Counseling for Hope, Health and Healing

CENTERPIECE with Harvey Yoder

Short messages of Insight and Inspiration

2008 - Series 2

1.  I’ve been thinking a lot about something the late Lee Eshleman, with fellow humorist Ted Swartz, said several years ago in an interview with WVPT’s Jenni Howard (for her documentary on area Mennonites):

Lee: “Take whatever stereotype you have about Mennonites, and assume it may be true for a fraction of us, and not true for another fraction of us. Then talk to us one on one. And do that with everybody, everyone in the whole world.”

Ted, incredulously: “You mean everyone?”

Lee: “Yes, everyone. Talk with them all.”

The wisdom in Lee’s wit is that any generalization we make about any group--Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, you name it--needs to be tempered and tentative until we have “talked with them all.” So what if we took time for actual conversations with, say, our recent immigrant neighbors, or become good friends with some Muslims--or with members of any race, religion or nationality with whom we have few personal connections?

I’m not suggesting we should just agree with everyone who differs from us, or compromise our convictions to accommodate theirs. But we can at least learn to respect others and to show respect for the complexity and diversity within each person--and within each group of persons--on God’s good earth.

That's my goal. Before making hasty judgments, I want to talk with them all.

2.  According to the November 1, 2007, Wall Street Journal, a number of parents and sociologists have expressed concerns about how many students aren’t dating anymore. The article notes, for example, the increased numbers of high schools that have canceled home coming prom events due to lack of kids interested in attending. The same trend away from dating is noticeable at the college level. In one survey of students at Michigan State, 60% of students said they’ve had one or more sexual encounters in what are referred to as "friends with benefits,” but most aren’t dating. In fact, the Journal of Sex Research reports that 9 out of 10 "hook ups" of that kind don’t lead to any kind of relationships. Laura Sessions Stepp, author of “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both” says her research indicates that while guys used to need to call a girl by Wednesday for a weekend date, many now simply send a text message at 1 am to a potential hook up and get what they want. While some women claim they favor these one night stands, many more have regrets, she says, and notes that women show considerably more signs of depression after casual sexual relationships than do men. I know the older pattern of casual dating, then going steady, becoming engaged, and then getting married may have had its drawbacks, but instant and promiscuous hookups, followed by various tries at cohabitation, just don’t strike me as an improved recipe for stable and lasting relationships. (Wall Street Journal November 1, 2007 D1)

3.  One principle for parents to take into account in raising their children is to provide an environment at home that resembles the way the real world works. In other words, in the real world of work, for example, you don’t normally get chewed out or publicly humiliated when you break a rule or don’t do your job the way you’re supposed to, but are generally dealt with according to a policy manual that outlines corrective actions that are to be taken, in a series of steps, as in being called in to see the human resources person, being written up, given a warning, experiencing some kind of penalty, and eventually being fired. But these aren’t just arbitrary reactions by a work supervisor based on the kind of mood he or she happens to be in at the moment

 In a similar way, parents need to follow some kind of reasonable but no-nonsense family legal system, whether it’s in written form or just a set of clear behavior guidelines that are reviewed from time to time, modified or revised as needed, but applied in a consistent and respectful way. Another application of the above principle is that in the real world people don’t just bring you everything on a silver platter. You have to pull your weight, do your fair share. And in the real world, you can’t just get your way or get what you want by throwing a temper tantrum or by whining or begging or manipulating. In fact, lots of people who live that way as grownups end up with some time out in a real world jail.

4.  I’ve been telling couples I work with is that its better to let a problem remain unresolved than to do things that make it worse. I know there’s something about us that makes us feel uneasy or even desperate about not having bad problems resolved, now, but sometimes the shortcuts we take in order to try to remedy them, like being coercive or demanding or argumentative, just escalates the conflict and causes even more problems in the end. So one of the ideas I’ve been field testing with some couples field test is to have them use a notebook that each spouse has access to, in which before either brings up a complaint or concern verbally, that they put it into writing. The other partner can then write a response, and of course can, at any time, write down concerns of their own. This becomes a way of giving each person more time to reflect on issues in a rational and calm way and to consider helpful ways of later dealing with them. Then when the couple has its regular couple’s meeting, a kind of business partner type of session, the items in the book become the agenda for their negotiation and problem solving time together. The rest of their time together they can then be in their “problem-free mode,” secure in knowing that their issues can be filed away and addressed later, with the help of an outside counselor or mediator if necessary. So unless there’s a fire or a serious accident, its usually better to give problems some rest and reflection rather than immediately going about making them worse.

5.  My wife’s 100-year-old single aunt Gladys Marie Lauver died December 10, 2007, after having lived a commendable and useful life as a devoted mother-at-large in her family and church family. Within two-weeks before and after her death, an astonishing five great-grand-nieces and nephews of hers entered the world, infants who could claim her as their great-great-great aunt. Had Gladys Lauver lived and been able, she would have gladly made room in her heart and in her prayers for each of these new members of her extended family, the five most recent of which included two pair of twins, Patrick and Amber Miller and Autumn Brooke and Amber Sky Yoder. The fifth newborn, 7 lb. 10 oz. Robert James Hunsberger, at ten days of age, was present with his mother and father at the gathering of aunt Gladys Lauver’s friends and family at the Brown Funeral Home in McAlisterville, Pennsylvania, all of whom were paying their last respects on the evening prior to her funeral. As young Robert James’s parents mingled and shared memories, their little offspring seemed to be getting about as much attention as the well preserved remains of his venerable ancestor. The evening was a poignant reminder of how closely connected birth and death are in our human experience, how powerful a part they play in our lives, and that even if we live to be 100, we will still find that our stay here on earth seems pretty short.

6.  Clinical psychologist Shirley Glass, in a recent book Not Just Friends, describes a growing form of infidelity based on people forming deep, emotional connections with people at work or on line who were at first “just friends.” In this new infidelity, she says, affairs are not necessarily sexual, and aren’t by people who are may be looking for a new relationship. And they may or may not be engaged in by folks in a marriage they find significantly unsatisfying, although they have usually neglected nurturing the kind of good experiences together that help their relationships thrive.

Men seem particularly vulnerable to becoming emotionally intimate with some outside person, perhaps because they often lack experience in disclosing their deeper personal feelings to anyone, including their spouse. Women, who may more naturally offer emotional warmth and good listening, are also vulnerable to going from that warm empathic level to finding themselves in a full blown physical affair. What is devastating about these infidelities is the loss of trust that results, in that those involved feel the need to keep all of this secret. Some questions we need to be asking, according to author Glass, are “Do you confide more in your friend than in your partner?” “Do you discuss negative feelings or intimate details about your marriage with your friend?” “Are you open with your partner about the extent of your involvement?” These are among the things we need to keep in mind in order to avoid a slippery slope to marital disaster.

7. On May 24, 1924, in what became known as “The Crime of the Century,” 19-year old law student Nathan Leopold, Jr., and his friend and accomplice Richard Loeb, both from wealthy families in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, picked up 14-year old Bobby Franks on his way home from school and beat and strangled to him death, just for the thrill of it. Their well-to-do parents hired one of the best known lawyers money could buy, Clarence Darrow, to defend them, and the case made headline news for weeks. In spite of an almost complete lack of remorse on the part of the perpetrators, Darrow was able to persuade the court not to sentence the young men to death because of their youth and their irrational mindset, one of the early cases of sentencing being based on the mental state of the offenders.

They did each get a life sentence plus 99 years, however, and after serving twelve years in prison Loeb was slashed to death by a fellow inmate using a razor. Meanwhile Leopold distinguished himself in prison by organizing a library for inmates, becoming an X-ray technician, volunteering as a human guinea pig to help find a treatment for malaria, and with Darrow’s help, starting a correspondence school for prisoners. As a result, he was granted parole in 1958, and with the extensive help of W. Harold Row, a graduate of Bridgewater College and a prominent Church of the Brethren leader, Leopold was released and lived an exemplary life of over a decade as a free man, perhaps demonstrating that no one’s case should ever be considered completely hopeless.  (Dale Harter, BRIDGEWATER winter 2008)

8.  In the fall of 2007 the Robin Hood Committee of the Girls Preparatory School of Chattanooga, Tennessee, raised $60,000 to build and support schools to educate girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They were inspired to do this by Greg Mortensen, author of Three Cups of Tea and the founder of the Central Asia Institute, which has already built over 60 schools in that part of the world. Mortensen believes education in that region is critical to people’s stability and future well-being, and remains tireless in pursuit of his vision, in spite of starting out in his school building crusade with almost no money, no construction experience and no skills in fund raising. What drives him is his conviction that educating a girl in a country like Afghanistan “reduces the infant mortality rate, stabilizes population growth, and raises literacy rates,” and in that way helps transform the culture. Meanwhile, his positive influence is doing more in the way of creating good will in the region than all of our official diplomacy put together

It makes me wonder what would happen if instead of our building more bombs and training ever more troops, we would invest more money, effort and time in cultivating relationships and in building schools that offer an alternative to the madness, the official educational system that often promotes participation in the Taliban. Maybe the members of the Robin Hood Committee of the Chattanooga Girls Preparatory School and the folks at the Central Asia Institute can help show us how.

9.  In Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she writes about an entire year in which her family ate and bought only locally produced food. A biologist by training and a widely proclaimed author, Kingsolver is concerned about corporate farming and about the affect the industrial agricultural system in the US has on the quality and nutrition of our food. So she and her husband and their two children did without bananas, imported fruit and fruit drinks, almonds, pecans and more varieties of food than she had ever dreamed of. They began to be acutely aware of the productive seasons of the farm year, an experience most of us know little about since our nation’s wholesale migration off the land and into sterile urban and suburban settings in the past century. They began to be very aware of where food came from, and what it means to have to wait for ordinary, taken for granted things like tomatoes, zucchini and green beans. The net result for their family was positive, she says, and her book helps point out how all of us can be a part of a movement that can be more friendly to the environment and make us less dependent on the fossil fuels required to transport huge quantities of food here from all over the world. A companion book, one with helpful recipes and practical ideas for living in greater harmony with God’s earth, is Simply in Season, edited by Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-Wert and published by Mennonite Central Committee.

10.  One of the problems with most of us procrastinators, strangely enough, is that we really aren’t good enough at putting things off, at least not the right things. This insight became helpful to me as I reflected on the fact that one of the major problems I had completing a task was that other more interesting or seemingly more urgent things all too often distracted me from whatever I had determined was the first thing, or the more important thing. At any given time, most of us can concentrate on doing only one thing really well. At a given point in the day, that “first thing” may be to tackle a project at work, clean up a work area or some room in the house, pay bills, do our taxes, visit a friend, do some quiet meditation, get some much needed exercise, or at other times, to just relax and get a good night’s sleep. When we find ourselves putting these “first things” off, its because some other things intrude, like just vegetating, day dreaming, or any other kinds of distractions that actually, in their proper time, could be a good “first thing,” but at the time is getting in the way of something we’ve determined is a priority. The secret, then, is to single-mindedly focus on one activity, the one that is the priority of the hour, and to avoid letting ourselves get distracted by other things, also legitimate, but that belong to another time frame. So if its any comfort, our problem isn’t our putting off skills, but our inability to make them work for us at the right times, in the right ways and about the right things.

11.  Dick Benner, director of Media for Living, a publishing agency in Harrisonburg, Virginia, recently wrote a column called “Tired of Trying to Sell Jesus,” in which he quotes author and speaker Don Miller as saying, “I was a salesman for a while, and we were taught that you are supposed to point out all the benefits of a product when you are selling it.. That is how I felt about some of the preachers I heard speak. It’s not that there aren’t benefits, there are, but did they have to talk about spirituality like it’s a vacuum cleaner?” Miller, author of the New York Times best selling book Blue Like Jazz, describes an alternative approach he and some of his friends tried on the campus of secular Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where they were attending.

They set up a reverse confessional booth where, instead of confessing their sins to a priest, they confessed sins associated with Christianity to their fellow students. For example, they apologized for the fact that so-called Christians launched the Crusades, that people like Columbus committed genocide in God’s name in the Bahamas, that some televangelists fleece people for profit, and that they and American Christians in general have neglected the poor and needy. This resulted in not only in a number of fellow students coming to faith, but also in turning their attention to the local homeless and in joining them in setting up a Poverty Day, where they and other students lived on less than $3 a day as an expression of solidarity with the poor.

12.  The January 2008 issue of PEDIATRICS magazine published the results of a New Hampshire study by five researchers of how children viewing smoking in movies affects their own smoking behavior. Elementary school students, 9 to 12 years of age were involved in this extensive longitudinal study, which showed that children's exposure to smoking in movies did indeed contribute to a greater likelihood of their later starting to smoke, even after adjustments were made for other variables, like whether one or both of their parents smoked, for example. Incidentally, approximately 80% of the children's smoking exposure occurred through movies rated G, PG, or PG-13, and the influence of movie watching patterns early in children’s lives was significant. Overall, according to the study, movie smoking may contribute to at least one third of smoking initiation for children in this 9-12 age group, according to the four PhD’s and one MD involved in the research.

Fortunately, smoking is no longer as popular in our culture now that we have gotten smarter about its negative health affects, and children are no longer seeing tobacco ads, or people smoking on TV like they did a generation or two ago. Nevertheless, it remains a serious health threat we all need to be concerned about, and one can only wish Hollywood would consistently put people’s health ahead of whatever adds to their bottom line.  Linda Titus-Ernstoff, PhD, MA, Madeline A. Dalton, PhD, Anna M. Adachi-Mejia, PhD, Meghan R. Longacre, PhD and Michael L. Beach, MD

13.  When the Writers Guild of America went on strike in November 2007, the networks had to drop a number of popular television shows in favor of doing reruns, and replace them with other programming. Apparently a lot of folks went through some serious withdrawal when their favorite shows were no longer aired. For most that didn’t last very long, though, according to a February 2008 article by Brooke Bates, writer for Harrisonburg’s Rocktown newspaper, entitled, “What the writers strike says about us: Our TV dependency revealed.” Most people, she said, instead of turning off their sets and spending more time outside or with their friends, just complained about the loss of their favorite pastimes and found some other kinds of TV fare to veg on. A senior at James Madison University is quoted in the article as saying, “Apathy wins out at the end of the day.... People take whatever’s given to them. Even if they’re devoted to a particular show, they’re able to find new things to spend their time doing... Like watching ‘American Gladiators’ instead of ‘30 Rock’.”

There’s something sad, and a little cult-like, about a culture that seems so dependent on a handful of Hollywood writers and entertainers as ours seems to have become. Shouldn’t we be able to find our own creative ways of having good face-to-face times with each other in activities that are satisfying and enjoyable--without needing so much of what has been called the “Plug-In Drug”? I hope so.

14.  On October 3, 1955, the Mattel toy company, for the first time, began advertising toys on television other than over the Christmas season, on the popular Mickey Mouse Club show. Until then, ad budgets at toy companies were minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel and the Mickey Mouse Club, and almost overnight, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, children's play became focused, as never before, on things the toys themselves, whereas prior to that, when people thought of play they would think of some activity rather than some object."

Chudacoff, in his published history of child's play argues that for most of human history children’s play involved being together in more or less unsupervised, imaginative activity, in which they took on the roles of adult heroes, or they spent a lot of their time doing what might appear to be nothing much at all. "They improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules.” But all of that has changed, he says, as we’ve supplied our children with ever more programmed toys and have involved them in highly regulated sports activities, partly due to commercialization and marketing of play but partly because parents have become so concerned about children’s safety. Now it turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function, the ability to better manage their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

Psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National Institute for Early Education Research believes children's capacity for self-regulation has diminished because so many of their activities involve toys or games that are highly scripted and limited in terms of using their own creativity and imagination to create scenarios for their play. A recent study of children’s self-regulation skills replicated one first done in the late ‘40s, in which kids ages 3, 5 and 7 were asked to do a number of things like standing perfectly still without moving for as long as they could. The 3-year-olds couldn't stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. Sixty years later, in 2001, researchers repeating the experiment found that “5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds back then, and ...7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old." Bodrova sees this as a special concern since poor self-regulation is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function, he says, is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are simply better able to learn. Unfortunately, because of such an emphasis on testing in schools, teachers are starting earlier and earlier to drill the kids in rote learning, and play is viewed as unnecessary, a waste of time, in favor of emphasizing memorizing material that will be on a test.

15.  The Ivy Jungle Network website cites Kathleen Bogle’s research into the dating and sexual behaviors of today’s college students, published in her recent book, Hooking Up. Bogle, who interviewed students at two unnamed universities - one large public school and one smaller Roman Catholic school, and concludes that the casual hook up is the "center for college social life." Her research does show that students overestimate the number of hook ups actually happening among their peers, and "how far" they really go, and how frequently, and she agrees that all this isn’t new to campus life, but that it’s become what she calls "the dominant script for forming sexual and romantic relationships on campus." She also points out the damage of this kind of hook up culture on women. First, she says, women are much more likely to get a bad reputation for engaging in it. Secondly, her research shows that women do not get what they want (i.e. a relationship) from their so-called casual sex - but engage in it because they believe it is the only way to meet men. This culture is also affecting young adults after graduation, she says. When these young adults enter more formal dating environments, many say they do not know how to go on dates and establish relationships outside of "hanging out" and "hooking up." Another survey done at the University of Cambridge, summarized in a January 2008 article in the journal Inside Higher Ed finds that students with more sexual partners are reporting lower grades, on average, whereas students who are celibate or have fewer partners are doing better,

16. While many of us question the wisdom of Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities limiting their children’s formal education to eight grades, and mostly focusing on basics like reading, writing and arithmetic, there is an overlooked side of the story. While their children often lack exposure to classic literature and the arts, other than the surprising number who become lifelong readers of books from public libraries and other sources, their overall education offers something most of our children miss--for example, how to grow, harvest, preserve and prepare food other than the over packaged and over processed stuff available at the nearby supermarket. It’s sad that in our Shenandoah Valley, once known as the number one food producing region in the south, most of us would starve if affordable fuel were no longer available to transport food products here from all over the world, whereas our Old Order neighbors and their children have been schooled in the kind of work ethic and survival skills that could go a long way toward helping them live through a serious recession or fuel or power shortage. And in good times, by the time their children come of age, they are prepared not just for menial, minimum wage jobs, but have many of the managerial skills they need to become entrepreneurs in million dollar enterprises such as their family farms and other family-friendly enterprises. Maybe the rest of us should think harder about offering more low-tech survival skills to a well rounded education.

17.   In a chapter in the book, “Schools for Conversion--Twelve Marks of the New Monasticism,” Shane Claiborne writes, “The more I’ve gotten to know rich folks, the more I am convinced that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor, but that rich Christians do not know the poor.” He adds, “Layers of insulation separate the rich and poor from truly encountering one another. There are the obvious ones like picket fences and SUV’s and there are the more subtle ones like charity. Tithes, tax-exempt donations, and short-term mission trips, while they accomplish some good, can also function as outlets that allow us to appease our consciences and still retain a safe distance from the poor. He adds, “It is much more comfortable to depersonalize the poor so that we don’t feel responsible for the catastrophic human failure that someone is on the street while people have spare bedrooms in their homes. We can volunteer in a social program or distribute excess food and clothing through organizations, but rarely do we actually open up our homes, our beds, our dinner tables. In the end, I don’t believe Jesus is going to say, “When I was hungry you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me,” or, “When I was naked, you donated clothes to the Salvation Army and they clothed me...”“When the church becomes a place of brokerage,” he writes, “rather than an organic community, she...becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get fed), but no one leaves transformed...”

18.  I was reared in a rural Amish congregation my family belonged to until I was 15, when we joined a slightly less conservative group that allowed for the use of cars and telephones, even though we were still without the radios and television sets most of our neighbors owned. I’ve sometimes been asked whether I didn’t chafe under all of the restrictions I experienced when it came to my freedom to dress and live as I chose, whether I didn’t long for the opportunity to live like the rest of my American neighbors and public school classmates. I’ll admit there were times when there were some things that seemed more attractive, more convenient, or more entertaining. But there were also factors that made staying appealing. These folks were my people, many of them related to me, all of them a part of my identity and my support network. They loved me, and modeled a way of life a set of values I found admirable and worthy of respect. There was also a sense of security and belonging in this kind of semi-monastic community that’s hard to find in the rest of the culture. And in many ways it worked surprisingly well. Its members never had to depend on welfare assistance, they helped each other. They/we didn’t need a lot of law enforcement to keep us in line. While there were certainly cases of family and other conflicts, divorce was almost unheard of, and the percentage of functional, peaceable family units was impressive. Maybe in the end, identity, love, security and a sense of belonging are what we really need the most.

19.  Writer Dan Reiland contributes a chapter to the book "From a Father's Heart,” called “Living on Purpose,” in which he challenges his two children to find what brings them joy and fulfillment, then invest in that to their fullest. “You have only one life to live,” he writes, “live it on purpose. Don’t let the years speed by and end up sitting in a rocking chair staring at a gold watch and wondering, ‘Was this all life was about?’” He further urges his children, McKenzie and John Peter, to live with “passion, on purpose, by intention.” You must live deliberately, he says, and commends to them the following words by George Bernard Shaw:

"This is my true joy in life--being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I've got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

20.  The story is told of two friends who were on a journey through a desert At one point on their journey, they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other in the face. Without saying anything, the one who was hurt wrote these words in the sand:

"TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE"  They kept on walking, until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath, and the one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and began to drown, but his friend saved him. After he recovered, he carved on a stone the words:

"TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SAVED MY LIFE"  His companion asked him why he wrote that message in stone instead of  in the sand.   To which he replied: "When someone hurts us, we should write it down in the sand, where the winds of forgiveness can rid us of the memory of it forever, but when someone does something good for us, we should engrave it in stone, where nothing can ever erase it from our minds."

I don’t know the source of that story or fable, but I like what it says. All too often we keep careful track of our grievances, but fail to remember all the good things others do for us. It would be a good thing indeed if we learned to WRITE OUR HURTS IN THE SAND AND TO CARVE OUR BLESSINGS IN STONE.

21.  Marriage researcher John Gottman finds that its not how much money a couple has, not how good their love life is, not about how rewarding their careers are, or their hobbies, or how wonderful their children are that make their marriage lasting and satisfying, but that its mostly about how good they are at cultivating just plain good friendship. A quality friendship, he says, is based on such everyday things as showing honor and respect to your spouse, allowing him or her to influence you and to affect your decisions, and just getting to know and appreciate your spouse as a valued human being, someone you spend time talking and walking and working together with, all of the kinds of things dating couples are usually so good at doing. And the great thing about this is that we already know how to do most of those things. It’s just a matter of making that conscious effort, for example, to make four positive statements or do four positive things for your partner for every one thing you do that’s critical or comes through as insensitive or unkind. And when we do something negative, to apologize. It’s all very simple, but not necessarily easy. It takes work to maintain that kind of good friendship.   A successfully married person was once asked, “When did your friendship end, and your love begin?” “Ah, but that’s our secret,” was the reply, “Our friendship never ended.”

22.  My parents weren’t overly demonstrative when it came to showing affection, publicly at least, but they had a time-tested love for each other that came through in lots of quiet, every day ways. An older cousin told me about a time when he was a child and he and some of his siblings were dropped off at our house for the day. My mother was going through considerable stress in dealing with some of us nine children who were getting pretty hyper with so many of our cousins around. He said that when my father came on the scene, that before he offered to help calm all of the rowdiness going on, he first simply walked over to my mom and gently kissed her on top of her head, a gesture of empathy for a stressed spouse that impressed him, a sign of love that can mean as much as a dozen red roses.

James Thurber once wrote, “My pet peeve is the bright detergent voice of the average American singer... yelling or crooning... songs of the day about “love.” Americans are brought up without being able to tell love from sex..., Snow White or ever after. We think it is a push button solution, or an instant cure for discontent and a sure road to happiness, whatever that is. By our sentimental ignorance we encourage marriage as a kind of tranquilizing drug.” Then he adds, “A lady of 47 who had been married 27 years and had six children... once described it (love) for me like this: “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.”

23.  Researcher Laura Berk believes children’s ability to self-regulate, to manage and control their own behavior, effects healthy development in every aspect of life, and that engaging in spontaneous play, without a lot of elaborate toys, is a powerful tool for building that kind of self-reflection and self-discipline. The reason, she says, is because in imaginative play children engage in what's called private speech, that is, they talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it, a skill effective adults use in order to solve problems, master new skills and manage their emotions. She finds that the more structured a child’s play, the less private speech they engage in, and that when children's play is highly focused on structured lessons and organized leagues, and with more and more kids' toys that fail to encourage imaginative play, kids aren't getting as much practice policing themselves. "One index that researchers, including myself, have used," she says, “is the extent to which a child, for example, cleans up independently after a free-choice period in preschool. We find that children who are most effective at complex make-believe play take on that responsibility with… greater willingness, and even will assist others in doing so without teacher prompting."

A February 21, 2008, NPR Morning Edition report on these findings notes, “In our rush to give children every advantage to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them our culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a waste after all.”

24.  One of the missing pieces in a lot of our lives as men, according to Alan McGinnis, author of The Friendship Factor, is our having good, close male friends to get together with and to just talk. We men are much more likely to just have golfing partners, hunting pals, sports buddies or business associates, but few are likely to be the kind of confidantes we can really be open with. In other words, most of our friendships as men tend to revolve around activities, while women’s revolve around sharing their thoughts and feelings. He cites a study done by British sociologist Marion Crawford, who found that by an overwhelming majority when women talked about good friendships they talked about trust and confidentiality, whereas men described friends as “someone I go out with” or “someone whose company I enjoy.” A man is more likely to describe as “a very good friend” a person who is an occasional tennis partner or someone with whom he had a good conversation for the first time just five minutes ago.

I’m not advocating that we try to rid ourselves of all of the intriguing differences between the genders, but I do wonder if we men wouldn’t be better off if we spent more time with a few good peers with whom we could disclose more of what’s eating at us--or delighting us, for that matter.  I know I, for one, need to do more of that.

25.  I often hear spouses complain about how much time their partner spends with others and how little time they seem to have to spend with them. Certainly couples need to work at finding a good balance between time together and time with others. But not all relationships with friends need to be seen as competing with a good marriage. In fact, it might actually be something the relationship needs to complement and enrich it. Alan McGinnis, author of The Friendship Factor, says it’s a big mistake to assume that your spouse is the only friend you need, or that he or she, or any one person can ever meet all of our emotional needs. In my observation, without some network of good friendships, we as couples can be like people coming together with empty buckets, expecting our partners to fill them, and then feeling really resentful when they’re unable to be for us all that we expect. With some other good supportive relationships in our lives, we’re more likely to be able to come together with full buckets, revitalized and able to celebrate and share our enriched lives with each other. Of course, spouses should work at being each other’s very best friends in the all the world. But as McGinnis observes, since no one person is ever going to be able to make us completely happy, our lives must include multiple interests, and a variety of good friendships, if we are to avoid depleting our relationship with our “most special of all” friend, our spouse.

26.  How do we teach children about faith? I once heard Alan and Elinor Kreider, veteran church workers in England, discuss how we need to think and talk about God in ways that are intelligible but that also include the element of surprise. God should be envisioned as “attractively puzzling” they said, as somehow knowable but also representing mystery and unpredictability, as a deity who is untamed and wild as well as constant and trustworthy. Children are great at envisioning God in this kind of imaginative way, are able to picture the Unseen in ways that are outside the box we tend to create for him. So in teaching our children faith, it may be more important to use imagination than indoctrination, to use poetry and story and art than have them memorize phrases from a catechism, to spend more time in wonder and amazement at the mysterious and unseen. Our words can certainly be of help, but they may also limit God through our use of definitions by which we claim to have everything in the realm of the supernatural all figured out and sorted into neat categories. And when you think about it, a lot of scripture is in the form of story, or is written as poetry, which makes it more puzzling sometimes, but attractively and intriguingly so for children of all ages.

So how might we excite our children’s imaginations, whet their appetites for a God they can know from the heart, not just from their heads? Perhaps in this way of teaching them bout faith, we may increase our own.

27.  One of the effects of alcohol use is to decrease the amount of serotonin in the brain, serotonin being one of the chemicals that help us do good reasoning and to exercise reasonable caution. A lack of it tends to add to the likelihood of people--especially our teens and young adults, whose brains are going through their last major growth spurt--to act aggressively, drive carelessly, date dangerously and otherwise behave irrationally. So there are good reasons why using alcohol isn’t a great idea for young people or, from my perspective, not always a great one for most grownups, either.  It’s unfortunate that the consuming of “all the alcohol you can hold” has become such a weekend rite of passage for so many teens and young adults, resulting in anything but mature, adult-worthy behavior. There have got to be better ways to prove one is a real grownup than having a 21st birthday party in which everyone gets inebriated by alcohol or high on other drugs--truly grownup things like taking adult leadership roles and responsibilities, by getting involved in making our communities and our world a better place. As parents and other adults, we need to lead the way by showing that we don’t need to use drinking as a symbol of our own status as full fledged, self confident adults.  Because unless we overcome our own dependence on it, the easiest place for most kids to get beer is going to continue to be in our own homes, in the refrigerator right next to the milk.

28.  One government agency is reported to have come up with a figure of over $160,000 to raise a child from birth to 18 in a middle income family, and that doesn't even touch college tuition. But someone has observed that that actually translates to just over $24 a day, or about a dollar an hour, and then notes what we get for that investment. Examples: Naming rights. First, middle, and last!  Glimpses of God every day. Giggles under the covers every night. More love than your heart can hold. Butterfly kisses and Velcro hugs. Endless wonder over rocks, ants, clouds, and warm cookies. A hand to hold, usually covered with jam. A partner for blowing bubbles, flying kites, building sand castles, and skipping down the sidewalk in the pouring rain. Someone to laugh yourself silly with no matter what the boss said or how your stocks performed that day. You get to be a hero just for retrieving a Frisbee, taking the training wheels off the bike, removing a splinter, filling a wading pool, coaxing a wad of gum out of bangs, and coaching a soccer team that never wins but always gets treated to ice cream regardless. You get a front row seat to history to witness the first step, first word, first bra, first date, and first time behind the wheel. You get to be immortal. In the eyes of a child, you rank right up there with God. Not so bad for a $1 an hour.

29.  You have all the power to heal a boo-boo, scare away the monsters under the bed, patch a broken heart, police a slumber party, ground them forever, and love them without limits. One day they will, like you, love without counting the cost.  So for your money, there is just no greater bang for your buck.  Watching Saturday morning cartoons, going to Disney Land.  You get to frame rainbows, hearts, and flowers under refrigerator magnets and collect spray painted noodle wreaths for Christmas, hand prints set in clay for Mother's Day, and cards with backward letters for Father's Day.  You get an education in psychology, nursing, criminal justice, communications, and human sexuality that no college can match. You get another branch added to your family tree, and if you're lucky, a long list of limbs called grandchildren.~ Author Unknown

30.  The 2000 U.S. census figures show that colleges on average are enrolling 100 female to every 85 male students, creating a major disparity between the sexes in one of our major subcultures in society. You have to wonder how that effects the kinds of relationships that exist between young adult men and women in our colleges and universities. Do women get more--or less--respect in this kind of environment, in which half of the college women surveyed recently by the Independent Women’s forum reported they had been on six dates or fewer in their entire college careers? While 39% of the women students still described themselves as virgins, 91% said their campuses had a pervasive “hook-up culture.” In other words, dating on campus has been replaced, for many, by students simply pairing off for the night after meeting someone at a party or a bar, going straight from meeting someone interesting to “hooking up” with them. Similar kinds of easy come, easy go relationships are happening at distressingly younger age for all too many teens. In a recent meeting on concerns about youth and young adults in our community, one of the presenters said that teens are tired of hearing about abstinence, and that school and other programs promoting it aren’t working, which is evidently true. But I still believe parents and other good mentors should make the case that waited-for sex is a wonderful, God given celebration that’s worth every minute of planning and preparing for.

31.  I once heard an older couple talk about when they applied for their marriage license years ago, and one of the questions on their application way back then was, “Have you ever been judged to be insane?" Their first thought was, “Well, maybe not until right now, in taking this step." When you think about the fact that the number of divorces each year in our country is approaching half the number of people who are getting married, it may almost seem like an act of insanity to take the risk of saying “I do” to someone for life, to be willing to covenant to remain with one person “through sickness and health, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, until death do us part.” And when you consider the fact that many of the 50% of couples who do stay together are likely experiencing many of the same regrets and distresses as those who divorce, is this a risk that does border on being a little insane?

Well, crazy or not, there is hardly an earthly pursuit so challenging, which so great if its good, and so awful if its not, as that of becoming a covenanted couple for life. Should we feel led to enter such a relationship, it might be a pretty good idea to invite God’s Spirit to bring about those inner changes that deliver us from our own selfishness, from those personal insanities that so get in the way of our being the calm, steady, and faithful lovers for life that only a miracle can make possible.

32.  Ever since medieval times, our culture has been enamored with the following tenets of the romantic love myth: 1) That being in love is a total mystery, something that can’t be described or explained. 2) That it is a mysterious kind of fate or power that comes (or goes) without any effort, warning or reason. 3) That love is like a magic power that radically transforms everyone under its spell. 4) That being in love is so overwhelming and all-consuming that one can’t eat, sleep, work or think about anything else but one’s beloved. 5) That romantic love is the ultimate good, worth giving up your dreams, your career, your life and even your current partner or your very values for. 6) Love is something that once it really hits you, you know for sure, with never another doubt, that you’ve found that one right person destined for you. And finally, 7) Love is the final word. Once you’ve found it/him/her, no one can tell you anything different. You just “know that you know that you know,” never mind what your friends or your folks or anyone else might bring up as a host of red flags. Psychologist Frank Pittman, author of a book about affairs called “Private Lies,” calls this kind of being in love as a “temporary form of insanity.” Certainly its a far cry from the scripture text that describes love as “patient and kind,” never rude or selfish, and that which “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

33.  Its tough being a parent these days, especially when it comes to drawing a line as to the kinds of media and other outside influences our children will be exposed to. We realize we can never completely protect our sons and daughters from everything that isn’t good for them. So where do we draw the line? I was with a group of parents not long ago discussing things like video games, computer use, television, and cell phones (which can now be used for lots of things other than phone calls). And it was clear that these parents were all along a continuum from those who chose not to even have television in their homes, and who severely restricted the use of computers and other forms of media, to those who reasoned that since children are going to grow up in a world in which these things are going to be an inevitable part of their culture, that they are simply going to have to learn to develop the kinds of inner controls that help them to make responsible decisions in these areas. We did all agree, though, that every family is going to have to draw some line somewhere.

I find the analogy of teaching healthy food choices helpful. We know our children will be exposed to all kinds of fare at their friends’ homes, and that we can’t control everything they’ll ever taste through all their growing up. But we can control what have in our pantries, and what we prepare and set on our tables. And we’re not likely to put a refrigerator in each child’s room stocked with all kinds of junk food. We are, after all, parents, and carefully protecting and guiding our children is a part of our job description.

34.  In our English language we use the word for love for anything from love for God to a craving for chocolate or our passion for our favorite sports team. The ancient Greeks had a number of words to choose from. One, agape, is an “in-spite-of-anything” kind of love used in the Christian Bible to describe the way God loves us and how we are to love every one of God’s children, friend and enemy alike, and our neighbors as ourselves, treating them as we would have them treat us. A second kind of love, philia, has to do with the mutual connection and family kind of affection we feel for others we like and with whom we feel a common bond. It has to do with companionship and fellowship and friendship, all essential qualities in a good relationship, as in “I like you, and enjoy being with you.” A third category of love, eros or mania, has to do with strong feelings of desire, often associated with physical attractiveness and bodily closeness, as in “I want you and need you--Now.” This can be a healthy part of a covenanted, for life kind of relationship we call marriage, provided the first two kinds of love are in place. But a fourth kind of love, based on the Greek word “ludus,” is chauvinistic and manipulative. This kind of attitude some may associate with love is more like a power play, one in which sexual conquest, without commitment or attachment, becomes the primary goal. Which when you think of it, doesn’t sound very loving at all.

35.  In a recent article entitled “‘Walk of Shame’--Dreaded Aftermath of Wild Party Nights,” in our local state university’s semiweekly paper, Mandy Gallagher writes, “College students, as a species, no longer date--they meet at parties and hook up, they meet at clubs and hook up, but they almost never hook up after dinner and a movie.” In other words, it’s become less awkward to just go to bed with someone than to ask him or her out. She quotes one male student as saying, “So you’re dancing or whatever with a girl at a party, and you talk for maybe five minutes, then you both have to leave. If you ask her if she wants to go out to dinner, or go see a movie, it sounds like you’re corny, comin’ on too strong or tryin’ to get too serious too quick. She’ll get freaked out.”

The sad alternative, according to Gallagher, results in the “walk of shame,” women dragging themselves to their dorm rooms the morning after, hung over, humiliated and/or depressed about what they’ve just been through, only to go through it all over again on another night on another weekend. Is this any way to establish stable and enduring relationships?

I can’t help but wish universities were able to create more opportunities for intergenerational campus conversations in which young adults could be in dialogue with caring mentors across the age span, experienced folks who could talk about just how important a good healthy sexual sobriety can be to their goal of living happily ever after.

2008 - Series 1

 
1. Nineteenth century author Mary Ann Evans, who used the pen name George Eliot once wrote the following, “Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are--chaff and wheat together--certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.” That’s the kind of feeling we all value in those who are our best friend soul mates, or our married life mates, folks who will understand and accept us even when we’re having a bad day and just aren’t in the best mood or on our best behavior. Of course we need to practice that kind of radical acceptance and tolerance toward others as well, while at the same time also exercising as much care as we can in order to keep from saying things that require too much filtering out on the part of the other person. In other words, we do well to have both an output filter, to keep us from saying inappropriate things in a less than a gracious way, and an input filter, to separate what is good from what is thoughtless or unhelpful that we hear from others, and from those we love. What a difference that could make in how we love, and live with, each other!

 
2. I recently heard speaker and writer Tony Campolo talk about a question he once asked an Amish bishop about what their rationale was for being against things like movies, television, radio, CD and DVD players, and the like. The response he got was surprising. “We’re really not against any of those things,” he said, “but before we adopt them, we just want to know how they will affect our lives.” In other words we want to know how will this impact our families and congregations. The bishop’s question for Campolo was, “How have things like television affected you? Do you think you are really better off with or without it?”
Campolo admitted the answer was probably “without it,” and in a recent talk to a group of folks in our area he went on to point out how the media we use have a way of shaping our values and affecting our beliefs. Even print media made us less dependent on others in our families and communities for direction, he said, sometimes a good thing, but maybe not so good as we become more and more individualistic and rely less on the wisdom of our elders. Electronic media have made us even less inclined to interact with others in personal ways, have made us more inclined to want to be passively entertained. It has especially affected the way we do worship, he believes, as we expect ever more interesting and attention-holding productions on Sunday mornings and become less active participants in our faith communities, and experience less time in face to face conversation and other connections together. 

 
3. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and injuries incurred in the war in Iraq, a largely overlooked cost of the invasion has been the staggering number of individuals and families who have become refugees. According to the October 8, 2007 issue of TIME magazine, over 2.5 million Iraqis, in a country of around 20 million people in the first four years of the war became so hopeless about their future that they fled to nearby Syria and to other neighboring countries, with another 2.2 million having been forcibly displaced within Iraq itself. All together, that represents nearly one-fourth of the population. The toll this takes on families is almost unimaginable. Of the 200,000 Iraqi refugee children in nearby Jordan in 2006, only 20,000 were able to enroll in school, and of those, 6000 dropped out because of various hardships and difficulties they experienced. All face a bleak and uncertain future. In spite of this, only 535 Iraqi refugees were allowed into our country in 2006, as opposed to nearly 9000 granted asylum in Sweden, for example. I commend the individuals and congregations in this area who are sponsoring Iraqi and other refugee families. We should all feel a moral obligation to provide hospitality and hope to uprooted people and to do all we can to help bring an end to their suffering.

 
4. In an all too familiar scene, four-year-old Johnny goes ballistic in the supermarket because Mom won’t let him get, say, the sugar laden cereal he wants. The smart parent, rather than her getting into a power struggle with her son, gets on the child’s eye level, arms on his shoulders, and states her respectful but firm position, like, “I know you want this, but we don’t use that kind of cereal at our house.” 
“But Mom, that’s the only cereal I like!”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t use this kind of cereal at our house.” (broken record response)
“But Mom...” 
“Sorry, but we don’t use this kind of cereal at our house. You can either stop begging, or we’ll go to the car right now for a time out in your car seat. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll take you to your sitter’s, and mommy will finish the shopping and go to the Taco Barn without you. It’s up to you.” End of discussion. 
Of course, Mother could take her son out and smack him instead of giving him a no-nonsense consequence. But that would be over in a harsh and heated instant, whereas removing him from the store, enforcing a five-minute time-out in his car seat (time doesn’t start until he cooperates), and bringing an abrupt end to the fun of shopping and eating out with his mom delivers a lesson that keeps on teaching for the rest of the day.
And in case you’re wondering, there are worse things than leaving a half-filled shopping cart in the grocery aisle. Like not doing whatever is necessary to teach Junior the meaning of No.

 
5. I’ll never forget an autumn day many years ago when we walked our oldest son, age five, to the end of our lane to get on the large yellow school bus picking him up for his first day of school. It was a moment we thought we had all prepared for, and even looked forward to, but it was still a lump-in-the-throat experience to see him bravely step into that other world where we could no longer protect him or watch over him as we had before. This is only one of the many experiences of letting go parents are faced with in their children’s journeys from birth to adulthood. From our children taking their first steps, first toward us, then away from us, as they become ever more mobile, expanding their circle of friends, getting a drivers license and being able to drive on their own, leaving for camp or for their first date and jobs or for college or career, parenting is one experience of letting go after another. Which means the direct and almost complete control we have during our children’s infancy gradually slips away from us, until in 18 or so short years it is for most practical purposes pretty much gone. In the meantime, we can either become involved in endless and rancorous power struggles, or we can wisely and gradually turn over more and more responsibility to our offspring, teach them good self-control, and in the meantime hope to develop the kind of good influence with them that can last a lifetime. 

 
6. According to an August 29, 2007, Associated Press release, a poll conducted by the AP and MTV indicates that young people who consider themselves religious are happier than those who are not.  The survey of 13-24 year olds indicates that 44% of young people say that religious beliefs are at least “very important” to them.  Only 14% said they were not important at all.  80% of those who said that spirituality was the most important thing in their lives said they were happy, while only 60% of those who didn’t consider God important at all indicated happiness.  Sociologists say these results confirm, for one thing, the importance of the sense of community found in most faiths.  Less encouraging, according to an MSNBC report of September 16, 2007, quoting another study funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, 81% of 18-25 year olds list "getting rich" as either the most important or second most important goal in their lives.  Many believe that if they pursue money early in their careers they will later be able to pursue the other things that make them happy and fulfilled.  They would do well to heed the words of Robert Reich, a former Labor Secretary under President Clinton and current professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkley who says, "Any young person who believes they can make loads of money first and then pursue their dreams afterwards is fooling themselves.  The pursuit of money as its own end can cause dreams to disappear.”  Or as the greatest authority on the subject once asked, “What will it profit a man or woman to gain the whole world, only to lose their own soul?”
(MSNBC September 16 ,2007)

 
7. I had a parent in one of my classes complain how addicted their teen had become to screen media. So they came up with a rule, “You’ll have to go outside for at least an hour for every hour you spend  with the TV or the computer or playing video games. Amazingly, when her hour was up she’d just go outside and sit, wait out the next 60 minutes until she could come back in. Most of us probably don’t get that addicted, but if we wonder how dependent we’ve become on our favorite screen addictions, it might be good to actually log our use of various media in a given week, and then try eliminating or seriously limiting our use, and see what happens. 
Bruce Bradshaw, in his book Change Across Cultures introduced me to the word reification, about human societies creating things that become their masters instead of their servants. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from a few folks in our community getting black and white TV sets that got one or two channels on a good day (with programming that went from six in the morning until ten at night) to now, where most of us have wall to wall entertainment and information that could take a lion’s share of our waking hours in a day if we let them. And in the last 50 years we’ve gone from having around 1000 theaters in this country featuring X-rated movies to now having millions of small theater screens, including even some cell phones, that offer pornography at the click of a mouse or the touch of a button. In that kind of media environment, the potential for harm and addiction are enormous.

 
8. According to the August 2007 issue of Harris Interactive Trends and Tudes, college students today are spending lots more money than students in any other era.  Discretionary spending by this growing demographic group is $63 billion, up $10 billion since 2002.  Food accounts for the largest chunk of that spending (37%); followed by clothing and shoe purchases.  Technology is also very important to them, with laptops now outnumbering desktop computers among all students (63% have them - up from 42% in 2005). Digital cameras, MP3 players and portable game systems are also popular items on campus, and virtually all students now have cell phones (with fewer than half have a landline phone).   In 2002 only 2/3 of students owned  a cell phone.  In addition to frequent calls, nearly 70% of students use text messaging and almost half take, send and receive pictures. The same issue reports that more than half of college students visit social networking sites (like MySpace or Facebook) every day.  These sites are the preferred mode of communication for more than a quarter of students, whether communicating with friends on campus or staying in touch with friends across the country or around the globe.   Online gaming has also increased in the last five years from just 2% of students in 2002 to nearly 25% today. All of this reflects the fact that today’s students have more money on their hands, if not more time, than ever. (Harris Interactive Trends and Tudes vol. 6. Issue 6 Aug. 2007)

 
9. I’ll never forget a wedding I did some years ago. When the time came for their vows, the bride pulled out a little scroll on which she’d hand copied her promises. He then got out his palm pilot and read his vows to her. Everyone smiled. Pretty much the same words, but the two forms of media were worlds apart. To illustrate how revolutionary recent changes in means of communication are, go back with me to rural Kansas where my parents were born just over 100 years ago. There was very little even in the way of print media in either of their childhood homes--a couple of Bibles, some hymnals, a handful of other books, no regular newspaper or magazines in the mail. And this was before rural electricity or telephones, and of course before radios or television or computers. Their communication was much more in the style of Abraham and Sarah than ours today--by word of mouth or by letter, by face to face time with neighbors and relatives and friends during the week, and then on Sundays for a simple worship service. 
If we could picture a foot long ruler as a media time line, starting with Abraham and Sarah, nearly 2000 years before Christ, to the present, 2000-some years after, the most dramatic of these changes have taken place in about the last quarter of an inch of that ruler. Maybe this can help us understand how much of a challenge it is to maintain our perspective, and our integrity and sanity, in the media flood that has a way of overwhelming us.

 
10. While some of our smaller colleges and universities are struggling to make ends meet, many Ivy League institutions are reporting phenomenal growth in their endowment funds, ao much so that the 2007 the Senate Finance Committee questioned why they don’t pass on some of that increase in the form of reduced tuition costs. Yale led the 2007 increase with 28% bringing their holdings to $22.5 billion.  Harvard now has nearly $35 billion in endowments, after a 23% increase last year. According to an AP report of October 14, 2007, if these well funded schools were to spend at least 5% of their endowments, as other foundations are required to do, an additional $1.5 billion could be available to students.
Meanwhile, parents and students are increasingly feeling the crunch of the rising cost of higher education. If the cost of gas had increased at the same rate as college tuition over the last 25 years, it would now cost over $9 a gallon, and a gallon of milk would cost more than $15. Part of the problem is of our own making, in that we all tend to demand better state of the art athletic and other facilities for our students and want all the comforts and high tech media accessibility in student housing as we have become accustomed to at home. Maybe its time for some universities to appeal to more of a niche market, to attract students who simply want to interact with more really good faculty minds and not demand the latest in first class accommodations.

 
11. I had the privilege of doing a meditation for the memorial service of Sophie Wenger Suter, who died at age 97 in September of 2007. She was a stellar kind of person, solid in her faith, steady on her feet, and a consistently bright light to those around her. I reflected on the fact that her name is from the Greek word sophia, for wisdom, which is one of the most highly prized of all good traits in scripture, describing a state of graciousness and godliness, a life lived prudently and in a way that is a blessing to God and to others, as the writer of the Proverbs says, “Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding... Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” In contrast, I noted, the Proverbs also have a lot to say about folly, about people who live lives that are imprudent and foolish, who get themselves into lots of trouble and who experience lots of regrets. Not Sophie. She settled down with the love of her life, James Suter, and stayed married to him until death parted them over 57 years later. She worked hard and well, as the mother of her beloved adopted daughter Karla, and served as head cook at the old Virginia Mennonite Home for over 25 years. She used her money wisely, saved prudently and gave to the church  regularly. To me, that’s a very smart woman, who while she completed only one year of high school and who made no pretension of being worldly wise, knew how to live well and to die well, and so truly lived up to her name.

 
12. My wife's sister Freda, in an e-mail to her siblings, recalls the old pump organ that occupied a prominent spot in the living room as they grew up. "Before the piano came into our lives," she wrote, "one strong childhood recollection is of mama sitting on the red organ stool on a Sunday evening laboriously fingering the keys, to find the right notes to 'Jesus lover of my soul' the one hymn she knew how to play by heart."
Freda went on to say that her older sister Gladys later took up the practice, so when the day came when their mother wanted to get rid of the organ she was the logical one to inherit it, but that it eventually found a home in their (Freda's) living room. She writes, "As time passed, it became a bit of an eyesore, and as we remodeled the family room, there seemed to be no right spot for that old pump organ. So it was relegated to a remote corner of our already overcrowded basement... Sometimes as I pass it, I look in those tiny mirrors on either side, and instead of this now sagging 72 year old face, I catch a glimpse of a little twelve year old curly head, as she lovingly dusts the old organ in days gone by," taking me back to memories of "past days and past times when life was so simple, when there was no need of computers or televisions, and an old pump organ was enough entertainment for a family of eight wonderful children and two loving parents."

 
13. Rosemary, a grandniece of my wife’s, wrote a recent e-mail “etiquette guide for non-pregnant people” based on some of the thoughtless things she’s experienced during her pregnancies. For example, “Commenting on someone's weight or size is usually completely taboo unless you are very, VERY well acquainted with the person.... (And avoid) the comment: ... "Are you still around?" Or, "Are you sure you're not having twins?" Trying to fix that by saying, "But really, you look GOOD...!" doesn't really fix anything... Asking a pregnant woman how she's doing sounds caring but she has heard it so many times that it is mostly just exhausting to repeat the answer again and try to think of a different way to say it this time. "Hi," or "Hello" is refreshingly brief. (Sometimes) the same people have asked each week at church about when the due date is. It is okay to ask once. Then either remember it; or, if you just can't remember it then by all means don't ask her to repeat it again every time you see her. ...and about belly pats...Why would someone assume that because you are pregnant it is okay to just walk up and pat your belly--without permission?"  And when the baby finally... graces the world with its presence, only comment on how cute it is if it really is cute, and on the name if you like it! Never say, "That's different," or, "That's interesting," ...That is just a veiled way of saying "It’s awful..." And let her get her advice from the OB docs and the pediatrician, unless she  specifically asks for yours.

 
14. The familiar New Testament texts addressing relationships within Christian households have always been problematic for some, as in wives being voluntarily submissive to husbands and servants being willingly obedient to their masters. But these were quite revolutionary texts to first century readers. For example, clear obligations are spelled out for both parties in each of the three relationships addressed, wives and husbands, children and parents, and servants and masters, where there was an undisputed superior and an inferior in each case. Husbands, the superior, had no obligations to their wives, only wives to husbands, to obey them no matter what. But both the apostles Paul and Peter require men to show the utmost love and respect toward their wives, in the same way that Christ loved the church and sacrificed his very life for her. Fathers, likewise, in those days had virtually unlimited power, and no demands or obligations with regard to their children, could treat them any way they wished. But here they are told to never be harsh with them or to mistreat them, but to bring them up in the loving nurture and instruction of the Lord. And masters, of course, had unlimited rights with regard to their servants, considered nothing more than property. Here they are commanded to treat them in a just and equitable way, remembering that they must answer to their master Jesus. In other words, believers are to act toward others the way Jesus would, with absolute impartiality, setting the stage for an end to all relationships based on dominance. 

 
15. Daughter Joanna, who teaches media courses at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, NY, marvels at all of the podcasting and MySpace posting and text messaging many of her young adult students are into, for whom e-mail has become almost as outdated as our snail mail. Most are far less likely to check out and read a book than they are to check out a movie or to find entertainment and information on the Web, and she’s had to actually walk some of the students to the college library to show them where the books and journals are that they need for their research. She realizes how much of the media-based technology she’s teaching her students today will be out of date before some of them even graduate, and wonders how all of today’s innovations are going to affect future generations’ enjoyment of face to face interactions with friends and family members, and how it will affect their written communication, given how much shorthand is used in text messages and instant messaging, for example, as compared to actually writing a thoughtful personal letter home or to other loved ones. And I wonder how all of this will affect the preservation of written documents like letters and diaries that have long been the source of invaluable data for future researchers wanting to learn more about the day to day life of people in a given time period. So there may be a down side to many of our newer, high tech innovations, especially those that have to do with how we communicate with each other. 

 
16. When the much anticipated Halo 3 video game came out in mid 2007, millions of copies were sold almost immediately. A student writer in the school newspaper of my alma mater, in an October 11, 2007, article entitled “Halo 3 Demands that the Fight be Finished,” even suggests  enthused that the new game is "so good, (even) Jesus would play it." 
I was glad to note that the next issue another student, Nick Meyer, called for a Christian “peace protest” in response, and wrote, “Halo 3 has taken at least 5.2 million gamers hostage as they enter into a narrative of conquering and proving themselves champions of an imaginary kingdom that will never exist. We must march on behalf of their freedom from this addiction as they squander precious time with wireless controllers in hand, trading endless hours for unfulfilling adventures ina world of fantasy. As if wasting away their lives weren’t bad enough, they are left with a warped sense of reality, finding real people boring and their roles in real life dissatisfying. Their ‘Bubble Shields’ isolate them from relationships, church and academics, keeping them from being productive citizens of their country and of the kingdom of God.” 
I know Halo 3’s defenders will say, “It’s only a game,” but  I'm still convinced Jesus would refuse to wield the "Spartan Laser, the Spiker, the gun turrets, and new grenade types" featured in this first person killer game.  At least there’s no hint of his ever having given any support to the tired and tragic notion that evil can be overcome by incinerating our enemies.

 
17. My wife and I were blessed in being able to attend the dedication of our third grandchild on October 28, 2007, the Sunday before his first birthday, which is  on the Eve of All Saints Day, Halloween. His father, our second oldest, addressed his young son with these words as a part of the dedication:
Ian, your (older) sister (our first) has taught us that as parents we are expected to produce lightning fast responses to a barrage of questions that typically involve answering a seemingly endless litany of one word, Why? No philosophy professor during college could have ever prepared me for the grueling interrogation a two year old would someday put me through. Furthermore we have been challenged to endure teary eyed explanations of (issues ranging from) why a family pet is no longer with us to suddenly justifying our favorite choice of cake.
We recognize that all too soon, Ian, you will also be expecting us to deeply examine what we believe and why. We pray that God will grant us the wisdom required to thoughtfully answer all of your whys, and we look forward to the spiritual and whimsical examinations you will demand from us. May we be constantly reminded that it is with a childlike faith unhindered by all the complexities of the universe that we are expected to trust in our Creator.

 
18. You may or may not have heard of the best-selling book, "How to Win An Argument," by Michael Gilbert, but Robert Heinemann, a professor of communication at Messiah College, in an article in their alumni paper, the Bridge, writes an interesting counter piece called "How to Lose an Argument." It's possible to win a  debate between you and another person that results in obscuring the truth, he says, and so we actually end up being a loser. Or we can lose an argument in a way that further reveals truth, and so experience a net gain in the process. There are four situations in which it may be better to make our point, but then let the other person "win," Heinemann says. First, we should lose the argument if we're actually wrong, even if its hard on our ego to admit it. A second reason to lose an argument, or to stop pursuing it, he adds, is if we realize that the goal of our opponent is simply to win the debate. Revealing truth is more important than necessarily having the last word. Third, we should lose, or give up, an argument if we realize that our own goal is to simply win, in which case, he says, we're probably not listening for truth anyway. Finally, we should lose the argument if we realize its simply unproductive and unresolvable. We do this best, he says, by stating the position of the other side in a respectful way, by restating our own position in terms of the other person's perceptions, by clarifying areas of confusion, and then expressing appreciation for the conversation you've had. End of argument.

 
19. Here’s a question to ask ourselves when we’re shopping for children’s gifts: How many brightly-colored, battery-operated, environmentally-unfriendly plastic playthings do children really need? No, I’m not another Grinch out to steal Christmas or spoil children’s birthdays. I believe every child should have lots of fun things to play with, and I mean every child in the whole world--in every refugee camp, every drought-stricken country and every miserable slum everywhere--including children who may work in sweatshops on the far side of the globe to help produce these high tech and highly advertised toys. So I believe in good toys. If play is the child’s work, toys are among the tools children use in their daily occupation. Active play with these tools helps them relax and have fun, stimulates their imaginations, offers them satisfaction in creating and building things, teaches eye-hand coordination and motor skills, and helps them learn to see tasks through from start to finish. 
But can our children have too much of a good thing? Or of some not-so-good things? We already know some toys can pose a physical danger to children, like recently imported Elite Operations figures, Thomas & Friends trains, and other toys that are unsafe because of lead-paint concerns or design flaws that pose risks of harm. But what about so-called “safe” playthings that promote violence, prevent children from getting the physical exercise they need, or limit the use of their imagination and creativity? These may present a more subtle danger, as may just having too many toys, period.

 
20. Before doing any more toy shopping at the nearest mall, it might be a good idea to check out the kinds of playthings found on the shelves of some good nursery schools in the neighborhood. 
I asked Rachel Diener at EMU’s Early Learning Center, “How many TV’s do you have?” None. “How many computer based DVD or video games?” None. “How many stuffed toys requiring batteries?” Not a single one. “How many brand name, manufactured toys, period?” A few, she said, mostly donated by parents, plus some sturdy wooden toys made by Community Playthings.
What I saw most of were sand tables, easels and lots of art supplies, along with shelves of plain wooden blocks, discarded telephones and various hats and other clothing items from thrift stores. And then lots of good books. 
What we learn from experts in child development is that an infant may get as much enjoyment from a recycled plastic bottle holding a ping pong ball as from a store bought rattle. That a young child will learn far more from playing Pattycake on a loving caregiver’s lap than from watching a Baby Einstein or Brainy Baby DVD. That a preschooler may enjoy  a box of wooden blocks of various sizes and shapes as much as a set of Legos. That children may gain much more from spending time in the natural, real world with other peers and adults than from surfing the virtual world. And that they will usually get a lot more more out of good books from the local library than from screen media in general. Sometimes the best playthings are free, simple and priceless. 

 
21. In an era of moral confusion about lots of issues, it's time for people of faith and morality to state clearly that any kind of torture of our fellow human beings is not a family value. In a column in the November 2, 2007, Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh writer Tony Norman laments the fact that a practice like "waterboarding," a tool for interrogation used during the Spanish Inquisition (in which victims are made to literally feel like they are drowning), is even a subject for debate in a civilized society. He writes, "Isn't it interesting that folks who can calculate when life begins down to the mysterious movement of the zygote in utero aren't able to say with assurance what torture is even when someone is choking in front of them?" He is also chagrined by the fact that, "Folks who claim to distrust their government's ability to tax them fairly somehow find it easy to defer to its wisdom when it comes to torture." 
He is especially concerned that in a so-called "Christian" nation that "Those who prostrate themselves before a tortured Savior every Sunday rarely think about the broken bodies and spirits of their 'enemies,'" and that "personal security has become such an idol that 90% of us would approve of the waterboarding of suspects to avert another 9/11." He fears that rather than our reentering a medieval period in our treatment of suspects, that "maybe we have never left our brutal superstitions behind," and that "maybe we're more like the terrorists than we'd like to admit."

 
22. According to the 2006 Healthy Community Assessment  done by the “Strong Families, Great Youth” Coalition in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, a surprising 70% of area teens haven’t used alcohol in the past year or ever, and 43% of adults do not drink. Some other facts reported are that, contrary to the common assumption that all teens who drink do so just to have a good time, 30% of junior and senior high school students who drink do it alone, according to another recent national survey, and that boredom and emotional distress are among their chief reasons for drinking. That study also debunks the myth that when parents allow teens to drink at home they are less likely to drink outside the home. The opposite is true. Those teens actually have a greater chance of developing a problem with the use of alcohol, the drug most likely to be associated with the death of 16-year-olds, often involving alcohol-related car crashes, suicides, homicides and drownings. They also cite findings that alcohol affects teens in an even more negative way than adults, in that their brains are still under construction until their early 20’s, so that health risks from their alcohol use are both more serious, and more permanent, than is the case with adults. As if all these weren’t reasons enough to discourage teen alcohol use, the legal consequences of minors buying or possessing alcoholic beverages in Virginia, or using fake ID’s for doing so, can include up to a year in jail and fines as high as $2500.

 
23. At the outset of one of the most tragic and senseless conflicts ever, World War I, some 1500 women from 12 countries met at the Hague for a convention of what became the oldest women’s peace organization of all time, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Their goal was to persuade leaders of all nations to stop their war preparations and to avoid sending their husbands and sons to battle. Among those who supported their cause was Jeanette Rankin, a US Republican from Montana, the first woman to be elected to Congress and one of the few representatives who voted against our joining that War, which ended up costing more than $337 billion, a monstrous sum in those days, and resulted in the loss of a total of over twice as many servicemen as had died in all the major wars in the entire previous century. The civilian death toll was an unheard of  5 million people who died as a result of  bombing, starvation, disease and exposure. On top of all the economic and other losses caused by World War I, the punitive and harsh terms of peace in the aftermath almost certainly set the stage for the rise of Nazism and the tragedy of World War II. So in hindsight, the women at the Hague, whom then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called “most dangerous,” were right, and the politicians and heads of state were wrong. We should learn to pay more attention to what our wives and mothers have to say about the folly of quickly resorting to the blunt instrument of war when there are international conflicts to be resolved.

 
24. Among the recent video games popular with children as young as six is Manhunt II, where according to a review in the November 1, 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “You’re urged to sneak up on your enemies and execute them in a variety of ways. You may stab them with a syringe, slash them with a glass shard, slice them with a sickle, strangle them with a plastic bag, bash their heads in with a  toilet seat--and that’s just in the opening chapters. When you’re playing the Wii (“wee”) version of the game, you use the motion sensitive controls to actually simulate the act of slashing and punching people.” In a November 17 letter on this subject to the editor of our local paper, Debbie Fordham of Weyers Cave writes, “Any parent who would allow a child to play this should be charged with child neglect.” Unfortunately, more and more parents are guilty of just this sort of looking the other way when it comes to the kind of violent video or online games their children are into, all too easily giving in to their begging for the coolest and latest versions they insist everyone is getting, regardless of their rating or their content. What will be the effect of this kind of indoctrination and desensitization on young developing minds? For help in learning more about this, and the content and ratings of current video games, <mediawise.org> is a good online source.

 
25. An ominous looking electrical storm caused Jeff Blackburn, pastor of the Greensburg Mennonite Church in central Kansas, to end his jog early on the evening of May 4, 2007. It was his wife Lori’s birthday, and he decided to make some popcorn to add to the pumpkin pie they were to have that evening to celebrate the occasion at home with their daughter. They thought little of it when Greensburg’s notoriously loud tornado warning siren went off, but went to their parsonage basement as usual to wait for the all-clear signal. Less than a half hour and a thunderous roar later, there was no longer any upstairs for them to return to. Actually, there was no more Greensburg since all of the homes, churches and businesses were virtually wiped out by the two-mile-wide twister, which took the lives of ten people in that little midwestern town. In talking about the utter sense of disconnection he felt after the storm, Blackburn said, “I can’t describe for you what it’s like to walk up into your house, and there’s no house.” Losing almost all of their possessions, he said, forced them to take a new look at their priorities. “Stuff isn’t very important when you don’t have much stuff left, when you’re just grateful to be alive,” he said, and added “I learned how materialistic I was when I had to list everything in my closet (for an insurance claim). No man needs 40 dress shirts. No man needs 20 pairs of dress slacks. You can only wear one pair at a time.” He also observed, “Disasters don’t make us who we are. Disasters reveal who we are.”

 
26. I wonder if those who deny that humans are a major contributor to global warming are the same folks who for years insisted there was no reliable evidence that smoking contributed to diseases like lung cancer. The damage to the earth that most reputable scientists are warning us about today appears to be the result of “smoking” of another kind, the discharge of millions of extra tons of carbon dioxide and other gasses into the atmosphere every year through all of the gas guzzling motor vehicles we’ve come to depend on for our convenience and status. In addition, we require too many sulfur spewing, coal-fired power plants to meet our demand for more and more electrical appliances, including summer-long air-conditioning even in our temperate climates. As if this weren’t enough, we keep contributing to the burning of millions of acres of irreplaceable Brazilian rain forests (sometimes referred to as the planet’s “lungs”) to provide grazing for cattle for ever more of the McBurgers we’d be better off without. 
I’m glad to hear about more people of faith now joining others worldwide to urge better care of the earth, just as many of us have traditionally stressed that our individual bodies should be well cared for because they are “temples” of God. 
Since, as someone has said, “Good planets are hard to find,” our Creator can’t be pleased at the prospect of the apocalypse that could happen as this one becomes less and less hospitable to human and other species worldwide.

 
27. David Gushee, in a column in the July 2007 issue of Christianity Today entitled “Old Fashioned Creation Care,” argues that old timey thrift and care for the environment go hand in hand. “The more I have gotten involved in the evangelical creation care movement,” he writes, “the more I have found myself drawn toward practices my grandparents did.” In other words, the concepts of “reduce, reuse-recycle” were around long before they became slogans in recent efforts to avoid polluting the planet with ever more waste clogging up our landfills. He particularly applauds such values as “hard work, modesty in consumption, consistent giving, and squeezing every last drop of value out of our possessions” that were a normal part of most people’s lives in earlier generations. My own parents, who were reared in very frugal families, and who went through the hardships of the Depression, never threw away even the smallest scraps of leftover food that might be enjoyed by a wild or domestic creature on our farm, and every spare piece of cloth found some use in a quilt or a braided rug. World War II seems to have been a turning point in American culture, when the propaganda machine that helped fuel the war effort was transformed into an advertising blitz to help keep US factories churning out ever more products and producing ever more profits. If we are to survive and thrive as citizens of God’s good earth, we’d better learn some good lessons on how to live from our grandparents and great-grandparents. Our great grandchildren will thank us.

 
28. In a September 18, 2007, piece in the Mennonite, Anna Groff addresses the problem of more and people incurring ever less manageable consumer debt. She cites Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren as predicting that if present trends continue, the US will find itself divided between a smaller group of reasonably successful and well to do families and a much larger number of households barely able to make it from paycheck to paycheck. While much of this problem results from individuals and families making unwise and irresponsible choices, Warren also faults greedy payday lending institutions and credit card companies for practices that prey on the poor. For example, she says a vice president of MasterCard admitted to her that a bank’s most valued customers are people who have declared bankruptcy. This is for two reasons, first because they can’t file a second time and second because they tend to be addicted to credit and are willing to make minimum payments for the rest of their lives. Warren claims that for every dollar charged, the average American pays more than $2 in interest and late fees, with the rate of their interest increasing because of their worsening credit, creating an increasingly untenable situation. In Theo Boers’ book on personal finances, Three Simple Rules, he advises 1) Spend less than you earn; make do. 2) Save now; buy later, and 3) Know debt; It can be helpful when invested in a home or business, but trouble otherwise.

 
29. Dr. Francis Collins, who grew up in a rural area near Staunton, went on to become the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institute of Health, and the author of "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief." He grew up in a family that didn't practice any kind of religious faith and considered himself an agnostic, then an atheist, until he came to faith at age 27, after an older patient of his who was dying of cancer shared her faith and asked him about his. This so unnerved him that he later spoke with a Methodist minister in his neighborhood who introduced him to Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis’s writings, especially the book Mere Christianity. But Collins also became persuaded that there was a limit to what science could explain about why there even was life in the universe, why there was anything at all instead of nothing, and as he reflected on what he calls the "irreducible complexity" and precision of the "physical constants in the universe,"  like the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," and the universal awareness we all have of some sense of Moral Law, of right and wrong, good and evil. One of his slides near in a recent presentation of his I attended was that of Dirk Willems, a 16th century Dutch Anabaptist who rescued an officer who, in his attempt to pursue and arrest him, broke through the ice in crossing a river and would have drowned had Dirk not saved him, resulting in Dirk being captured and burned at the stake. This kind of behavior, he says, cannot be explained by evolutionary theory alone.

 
30. Are faith and reason incompatible? Do we have to check our brains at the door when we profess belief in God, or pray or engage in other acts of worship? Or is all truth, from whatever source, God’s truth, and if understood correctly, all of one piece? Hymn writer Thomas Troeger thinks so, and writes this thoughtful praise piece, to be sung to the tune of “God of grace and God of glory”:

 
Praise the God of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind
With a passion for discerning how the world has been designed.
Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey
Keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to pray.

 
God of wisdom we acknowledge that our science and our art
And the bread of human knowledge only partial truth impart.
Far beyond our comprehension lies a depth we cannot sound
Where your purpose for creation and the pulse of life are found.

 
As two currents in a river fight each other's undertow
Till converging they deliver one coherent steady flow,
Blend, O God, our faith and learning till they carve a single course,
Till they join  as one, returning praise to you their source.

 
31. Associate professor of psychology Stephen Ilardi of the University of Kansas believes the reason we’re so depressed about our lives is because of the way we live our lives. In a November-December 2007 AARP magazine article entitled “Simply Happy,” writer Julia Klein quotes him as saying, “There’s increasing evidence that we were never designed for our sedentary, socially isolated, indoor, sleep-deprived, poorly nourished lifestyle,” noting that since World War II, as we’ve moved off the farm and become more modernized and urbanized, our depression rates have increased tenfold, and that this mood disorder has become an even greater problem with younger people than with older folks. Dr. Ilardi believes his approach to treating depression, called Therapeutic Lifestyle Change for Depression, or TLC, which involves being a lot more active socially, more aerobic physically, getting more sleep, and spending more time doing things, especially outdoors, rather than sitting around and ruminating about distressing things, is even more effective than antidepressants and traditional psychotherapy. He also bases this on findings that members of so called primitive tribal groups are virtually depression free, and that close knit, hard working, low tech Amish farm families also have amazingly low depression rates. He believes our bodies and our psyches just aren’t adapting to the sedentary, solitary and stressed lives most of us in the 21st century are living.

 
32. According to a November 16, 2008, n Associated Press piece, nearly half of teens age 13-18 use instant messaging on their cell phones and computers, compared to only about 20% of adults. Teens are also twice as likely as adults to use them for more sophisticated purposes than just sending text messages, like sharing music or video files or listening to music, often engaging in more than one task or in more than one conversation at a time. And while adults still send more e-mails than text messages, with teens it’s the other way around. One in ten teens in the survey on which the findings are based admitted to spending three or more hours a day instant messaging, about double the adult rate, and nearly a fifth are sending over a 100 IM’s daily, about triple the number for adults. One 14-year-old whose parents were trying to wean her from four hours of Im-ing a day is quoted as saying, “I could be practicing my viola or riding my bike... but I’d rather talk to my friends.” It’s interesting that this form of communication is also cited as being a way for teens to say things they would feel uneasy saying face to face, including asking for a date or even breaking off a relationship with a girl friend or boy friend. I’m not sure where this kind of high speed, high tech chatter is taking us as a culture, but I can’t help having some questions about whether they will help us build truly satisfying and lasting relationships.

 
33. Columnist Elaine Sommers Rich tells the story of Kayla and Marjorie Fuller of Columbus, Ohio, who take foster children into their home until they can be permanently placed. In January 1998 they took in 12-month-old Chris, suspected of being mentally retarded, maybe autistic. When he first came, Kayla said, “He rocked and screamed. He wouldn’t make eye contact... couldn’t stand to be touched and would scream and fight to get away...didn’t show any interest in toys... didn’t even try to crawl.
“The first night, after wrestling him into a clean diaper, I sat down in a rocker and pinned him to me while he screamed and flailed around, and I said, ‘Little boy, you will be loved in this house. so you might as well get used to it.’ I rocked him and sang to him and hung on until he wore himself out and fell asleep in my arms.”
Over the next  several days they did everything they could to entice him into their world. They sang. danced. patted the kitties, showed him brightly colored toys. talked to him about everything they did, and ended each day rocking and singing to him. On the sixth morning they woke up to the sound of laughing on the baby monitor...Chris was standing, holding on to the crib railing and grinning....He crawled over to the floor lamp, patted it, and said “Dat?” They said, “Lamp.” He said “Yamp.” There was no stopping him after that.
Nine years later, Rich wrote, Chris, now adopted, had become the official greeter for new foster children. “I’m the big brother here,” he tells them. “This is a safe place and you don’t ever have to be scared here.”  
MWR November19, 2007

 
34. Before he was even three, our grandson John began to reflect on the responsibilities and opportunities associated with growing up. So one day on a ride with his father he asked, from the back seat, “When I get big, can I drive the car?” “Well yes, after you learn to drive, and when you’re old enough to get a license, you can drive the car.” John thought for a while and then announced, “And Dad, when I get big and you get little, you can ride in my car seat when I drive.” 
Which seems only fair, and in a sense, we are likely to experience a kind of reversal of roles some day, when we become needy and our children and others will have to take care of us. 
My wife brought a similar topic up to him about a month before his third birthday, “John, when grandma gets very old and tottery and can hardly walk anymore, and you’re a big and strong and grown up man, will you help your grandma sometimes when she can hardly get around, or when she needs help to cross a street?” John had never thought about this, but seemed eager to help his beloved grandma in whatever way he could. But then he hesitated, “But grandma, there’s a problem. I’m not allowed to cross the street!” We all laughed.
There’ll be a lot for John to figure out before he is ready to drive a car or help anyone across a street . Meanwhile, in our own imperfect way, we are all helping him learn every day what it means to be a good, caring adult, finally ready to take on the challenge of being a good man--and perhaps one day a good father and grandfather as well.

 
35. Writer James McAlister includes the following characteristics of a good dad in an article 
EVALUATING FATHERS on his website james-mc.com:
Fathers go to work when they don't want to, listen when they need to, and sacrifice when they ought to.       
 Fathers love their families without responding to unlovely attitudes or actions. And they endeavor to live in such a way that they don't have to regret their own words and deeds.
Fathers cry tenderly over sick pets, bury them when they die--and comfort their grieving children. And fathers who have suffered the loss of a child or a mate struggle to rebuild normal lives despite the overwhelming emptiness and seeming unfairness.
Fathers laugh at children's jokes that aren't funny--and sputter to keep a straight face when children's serious efforts go humorously awry. They embrace a child's crude, handmade Valentine as if it were a Rembrandt.
Quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger, father's discipline in love but never ridicule or embarrass.
Fathers say "I was wrong" more often than "You were wrong." They easily confess their own mistakes and give their best efforts to straighten them out. Fathers generously sprinkle "I love you" and I'm proud of you" into their conversations.
Fathers readily tear down their own dreams to build up their children's. And they remain faithful to their flock despite the lure of "greener pastures."
Fathers learn to do important stuff like toss balls, dash through sprinklers and lie on the driveway to gaze at the stars. They bend low to kiss away hurts and wipe away tears. They weep at graduations and weddings, realizing how quickly their children have grown up and away.
Rather than "stuff," fathers give better gifts to their children: patience, humility, honor, truth and duty. And they understand that respect must be earned, not demanded.
Fathers know that they may be the only visible earthly example their families will every see of an invisible heavenly Father. And they eventually realize that their greatest battles will be won on their knees, not by their bank accounts.
Fathers grow into the men their mothers dreamed they'd be.
From “Evaluating Fathers” at james-mc.com.

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 I

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 childrens 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 familys e-mail link, My heart went straight to my toes when I  read your letter this morning, and I want you to know that well 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 doctors advice and do whatever seems to work. One of the people who was the most condemning of mothers 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 didnt 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 todays 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 Universitys 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 60s and 70s 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 DVDs, 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, Ive purposed... to try hard never to say something in anger that would hurt the heart of my husband. I know that Ive 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 childs 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 familys 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 wont 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, Ive concluded that were all pretty much in the same boat, that were 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 Gods 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 doesnt 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 kings army. He fought for it, and was given the estate as a reward.
Then lets 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 Ive had, were all examples of an amazing grace. Ive 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 theres 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 Johns 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 ones life is the best way to know someones 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 cant 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 persons 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 theyve 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, its Judge not lest you be judged, even though most of us disobey this command with great regularity. In couples 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 anothers 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 elses eye before first making sure we remove the 2 x 4 from our own. Ive 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 friends or family members 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 ones 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. Youve probably noticed that big cardboard box in the middle of your bedroom floor. As youve 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. Youve probably been curious about what hardcore looks like, havent 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: Dont 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. Thats 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 yesterdays 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

Short messages of Insight and Inspiration

2006 - Series I

Most of us make resolutions from time to time, whether at New Years or when

we’re unhappy with some weight gain, after returning from a sobering visit to a

doctor or dentist, or maybe after getting a bigger than expected credit card

bill. Unfortunately, most of our resolves don’t amount to much more than

wishes or good intentions. We can actually begin doing better, though, if we’re

serious about making some real changes in our lives. For example, if we 1) Start

with goals that are specific and measurable, like "I will spend ten minutes

of interactive time with each child daily," rather than just "I want to try to

have a better relationship with my children." 2) Commit to goals that are

achievable. "Losing thirty pounds by the end of the month" may not be realistic,

but limiting fast foods and fattening desserts to once a week is clearly

doable. 3) Make yourself accountable. Make note of your progress, and find someone

to partner with and report to on a regular basis. 4) Reward yourself for

successes. Allow yourself some enjoyable activity after you accomplish a task (not

before). 5) Refuse to say "I can't" to any of the above, but say instead,

"While I'm finding this really hard--I can and will find a way to do it."

Sometimes I’ve challenged myself and others by saying, “What if there was a

million dollar reward associated with meeting this goal?” In other words, if

we make the stakes high enough, most of us will do whatever it takes to get a

thing accomplished.

                                        * * *

Steven Covey, in his best selling book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective

People, promotes the idea of our writing a mission statement for ourselves, a

sentence or two that explains why we believe we exist. Some time ago I worked at

such a statement of purpose for my own life, not about my day to day work or

vocation as we usually understand it, but about a more basic life calling,

something that can define me and give me direction no matter what life stage I am

in, or how I happen to be making my living. It went something like this, “My

mission is to live a life that reflects a passion for God and a compassion for

others around me and around the world, beginning with my family and church

family. With them, and with God’s help, I want to help nudge all of creation

toward more harmony with God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.” I know that

sounds more than a little lofty and idealistic, but it was a good thing for me to

work on.

One young adult I know came up with this statement of her personal mission.

“To love and serve God by using and enhancing my time and talents and energy to

help others, one individual, one opportunity, one day at a time.” I liked the

way that one addressed the need for us to not only use our gifts for others,

but to enhance those strengths and gifts, and so actually adds to what we have

to offer others in a difference-making way.

                                            * * *

I remember hearing a story once about a man who needed to cross a frozen ri

ver. Not knowing how thick the ice was, he decided to crawl over the surface,

carefully spreading his weight over the ice to make sure it wouldn’t give way.

When he was halfway across, a local farmer, quite familiar with the strength of

the ice at that time of the year, boldly drove his team of horses and a

loaded wagon over the same surface. Needless to say, the man who was crawling got

up and confidently walked across to the other side.

Sometimes we have more anxiety than we need to because we don’t realize the

strength of what supports us, our faith, our family, our friends, our

congregational family. For example, I recently had someone tell me how sensitive he was

to his wife’s criticisms. Having had parents who divorced when he was young,

he lived in almost constant fear that the same kind of breakup could happen to

him and to his young family. What helped him was to have a good conversation

with his wife, to hear her reaffirm how important her commitment was to the

marriage and to their family, and to have her reassure him, and for him to

reassure himself, that she would not leave him--or if she ever became really

unhappy in the relationship, that he would be the first to know. In other words, to

hear a reaffirmation that the foundation under them was solid, allowing them,

by faith, to move forward in their journey with confidence.

                                * * *

Commentator Andy Rooney suggests that Memorial Days and Veterans Days become

times to not only remember the tragedies and losses of past wars but to work

at ending the holocaust of war itself. He urges us to find new ways of

preventing this barbaric human habit, and suggests we may need a “new religion” to

help us do this.

This got me thinking. What if a Supreme Being did establish a faith based on

a brand new agreement or covenant (‘testament’), one that would have its

followers worldwide 1) love and pray for their enemies instead of taking part in

destroying them, and 2) to choose suffering and even martyrdom rather than to

resist their Caesars or Saddams by violent means?

I’d like to tell Andy that I personally embrace just such a religion, at

least as I understand the teachings of its founder, Jesus Christ, who embodied the

messages of earlier Jewish prophets who proclaimed peace instead of advocated

war. Among these were revivalist preachers like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and

others who represented a minority peace movement within Judaism.

Which makes me wonder, What if every Christian family and Christian

congregation were to pledge to respond to violence the way Jesus did, not because it

seems practical or workable in the short run, but because it is the way God has

chosen to bring salvation and shalom on earth as it is in heaven?

                                            * * *

A 2005 study (DNR 10/10/05) by the Kaiser Family Foundation came up with the

distressing conclusion that the television shows most popular with teens in

this country portray even more sex than the average TV fare. According to the

study, 70 percent of the 2005 prime time shows featured sexual content, with an

average of five mentions or depictions of sex per hour, nearly double the

amount of attention given to the subject in 1998, seven years earlier. On the

recent shows most watched by teens, like Fox’s The O.C., and ABC’s Desperate

Housewives, and others, the number was 6.7 scenes or mentions per hour. How can it

be healthy for kids to be exposed to this kind of barrage of casual liaisons

among unmarried partners--and with unprotected sex at that--and showing few or

no negative consequences for this kind of behavior? Is there any wonder that

our teens and young adults are finding themselves having more and more

distress over broken hearts and broken bonds, some of which may never be fully

repaired? And how might all of this get in the way of their establishing good

relationships that will be stable and enduring, provide a secure environment for the

next generation to grow and prosper? The more I think about it, the more

convinced I am that most of our TVs and DVD players could just use a much needed

rest.

                                    * * *

I couldn't help feeling some concern and confusion when I read in our local

paper that a newly elected politician had announced that he and his wife were

going to Las Vegas for a much needed post-campaign getaway. It's not that I

questioned his need for some R & R, or that I had any suspicions about his or his

wife's personal behavior on the trip. I just wondered why, since this

particular candidate had run on such a solid family values platform--and with so many

other great American destinations to choose from--why he wouldn’t choose to

invest his tourist dollars in a more reputable city like James Dobson's

Boulder, Colorado, as just one example? At least in my opinion, Vegas has done a lot

to deserve its reputation as a Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style Mecca for quickie

marriages, easy divorces, legalized prostitution, gambling and other forms of

anti-family activities. Again, I’m not wanting to make any judgments about the

character of the couple in question. But I take it as a lesson for all of

us--preachers, parents, and yes, even politicians--that what we say we are about

should be congruent with the ordinary, everyday choices we make. If we are truly

in support of pro-family values, we need to walk the talk, and not send

confusing messages to our communities or our constituents, and especially not to our

children.

                            * * *

During the last weeks of my 76-year-old brother-in-law’s life he sent this

heartfelt farewell message to each member of his family and extended family for

whom he had an email address. “I have felt I should express my appreciation

for all the words of encouragement that so many have expressed and also for the

love you have shown to me and my family. It has been quite a journey and it

appears that it is taking its toll. (But) I feel resigned to what God has for

me. God has been good and given me much to be grateful for. My family has

been very supportive. Sometimes I feel it will be a blessed experience to go thru

death and meet the Lord on the other side. I am convinced there is life

beyond here -- (that) we (do) have something to look forward to.

I want to again tell you all that I love each and every one (of you).

It has been great being able to have a number of you nieces and nephews in

our home and to have you as part of our family. Thanks to all of you for what

you have contributed to our lives over the years. When I think of the Church,

I count it a privilege ... that God counted me worthy to serve in the

ministry. May God be praised and His name exalted. Sincerely, Mark

I was moved by those simple words, straight from the soul of a truly good

man, and it made me hope I could have the opportunity to share these kinds of

reflections and goodbyes with my family and friends when I near my journey’s end.

                                                * * *

One of my wife’s nieces, Mary Ann Yutzy, wrote the following words about the

mixture of sadness and peace she felt on the morning she said her farewell to

her young adult son, Lem, who at 19 was leaving home for his first experience

in a church mission assignment thousands of miles away. “He is so tall,” she

wrote. “When I hug him, I barely reach his shoulder. All the words I said to

him were said against his shirt. My Son. I held him for the last time in a

long, long time this morning, and tried not to cry.

‘Be a faithful disciple,’ I said. ‘Let God be your first and greatest love.

Let all the other loves of your life be defined by that... Know that you are

prayed for every single day, and that I will always love you. I am so proud

of you, so glad that you are mine.’

Then she reflects, Is there really anything more to say? How do you say

good-bye to what you want to hold on to so desperately when you know that there

is, will always be, another, higher calling? How can you resent it when a child

does what you tried to raise him to do?”

Niece Mary Ann’s reflections remind me that, hard as it is, life is one big

series of goodbyes, yet each time of letting go is also a time of saying a

hello to another chapter, another start toward the rest of an unknown but

promise-filled future, another opportunity to learn and grow and be blessed.

                                * * *

Becky Zerbe, in an article in Christianity Today called The List That Saved

My Marriage, writes of a day she decided she had had enough of her husband’s

irritating ways, and so packed her bags and left for a stay at her mothers. Her

parents were willing to make a temporary home for her and her 14-month-old

son, but mother said, "Before you leave Bill, I have one task for you...." She

gave her daughter a sheet of paper on which she had drawn a line down the

middle, and told her to list in the left column all the bad things Bill did that

made him so hard to live with. Becky assumed she would then tell her to list all

his good qualities on the right hand side. Determined to have a longer list

of bad qualities than good, she started immediately to write down her many

grievances. But her mother had a different instruction for the other column. She

said, "Now I want you to write how you respond to those things. What do you do?"

It was hard for her to admit on paper things like, I pout, I cry, I get

angry, I'm embarrassed to be with him, I act like a "martyr," I sometimes wish I'd

married someone else, I give him the silent treatment.

When she got to the bottom of the page, Becky’s mom took a scissors and cut

the paper down the middle. Taking the left column, she wadded it and tossed it

into the trash. Then she handed Becky her list of responses.

“Take this list back to your house. Spend today reflecting on it, and pray

about it. Then if you still want to leave Bill, Dad and I will do all we can to

assist you."

It worked, she said. We’re still together, two decades later.

                            * * *

Which divorces are easier for children, the ones where one or both of the

parents is constantly picking a fight, is abusive to the children or to each

other, is strung out on alcohol or drugs, is having an ongoing affair? Or is it

when two reasonably good parents calmly announce they just aren’t able to work

things out, and that they’ve decided its better to separate as peacefully as

possible--all the while assuring their children that they will continue to be

their devoted parents no matter what?

There’s no doubt, of course, that children in the first kind of family suffer

the most from their parents self defeating, dysfunctional ways. But when it

comes to the effects of a divorce, it may the children with the seemingly sane

parents who have the hardest time accepting and coping with the breakup of

their family. They are the ones who are most likely to agonize over questions

like, Why can’t my good parents just learn to get along, like they tell us we

need to do if we have a conflict with a brother or sister? Why can’t they make up

and love each other, live together peaceably, like they’ve taught us to do?

So I’m thinking a case can be made for saying that the worse the marriage, and

the behavior of the parents in it, the easier the divorce, and vice versa.

Even when there is inexcusably bad behavior, though, the wish of most children is

that their parents would first get their act together and then stay together.

                                        * * *

One of my wife’s grandnieces, a mother of two young, active children,

recently wrote this reflection on facing the end of life, something we too seldom

want to think about:

“Tonight, Hunter, my four year old son, wanted to be rocked before he went to

sleep. And I love to do it, even though I think he's just trying to delay

bedtime. As he sat in my lap, he jabbered on and on as if talking would keep him

from falling asleep. Finally I told him that he had to settle down because

this was supposed to be quiet time...and he needed to (rest)...

So I said his bedtime prayers with him and gave him his hug and kiss,

cautioned him to be quiet, and not run out into the hall (so as not to wake up his

little sister), tucked him in bed and said ‘I love you,’ and that it was time

to sleep.

And I got to thinking, as people get older and their bodies don't work

the way they used to, is God gently saying, ‘Slow down, it's getting to be

your bedtime?’ Is God saying, ‘It's time to make the toys be quiet now?’ And

they respond, become kinder and more patient with other people's faults, they

seem to mellow. They're listening to Him. And He gently tucks them into bed and

tells them He loves them. And in the morning, they are refreshed and renewed

when they wake up to see His face.”

Some good words by grandniece Rosemary Hunsberger, young mother of two.

                                    * * *

My great-great grandfather Christian Nisly, of Swiss descent, came to this

country from Germany’s Rhine River Valley in 1804 as a 17-year old. We’re not

sure whether his parents had died and he was just in search of adventure and a

better life in the new world, or whether he, like many other young men from

his peace loving and persecuted Anabaptist community, left to escape

conscription to military service--something he believed was contrary to the teachings of

Jesus--or maybe it was both. At any rate, he braved 89 days at sea, enduring

hardships that included a severe storm in which the ship’s two tallest masts

were damaged, and according to written accounts, having an encounter with

pirates, before arriving in Philadelphia, where he worked as an indentured servant

to pay off his fare for his journey.

Its hard to imagine the sacrifices many of our immigrant ancestors made as

they took the risks they did to make a new life for themselves a land that

promised them freedom and new opportunities. But these are the kinds of ancestral

stories I’m thinking we need to learn more about and to pass on to our

children. Not only will that help them gain a greater appreciation of their heritage,

and for the blessings they have received from their forefathers and mothers,

but these are stories that can inspire them to make hard choices, take the more

challenging road of following their consciences and their dreams in ways that

can shape all the generations after them.

                                        * * *

My grandfather, Daniel Yoder, at age 20, asked his girl friend Fannie Troyer

to marry him. She was only 16 at the time, but that wasn’t an unheard of age

to be considering engagement in their rural Indiana farm community. She,

wisely, asked for some time to think about it, and he, in part because his father

had discouraged this particular relationship in the first place, just dropped

her and never went back to get her answer. In fact, soon thereafter he married

18-year-old Lucy Lehman. A couple of years later Fannie moved to Kansas,

where, at 19, she met and married Eli Nisly, with whom she had thirteen children

and lived more or less happily ever after. Here’s the interesting part. One of

her children, Mary, married my father, and of course became my mother.

Meanwhile my Dad’s father Daniel’s life didn’t turn out so well. His first wife Lucy

died at age 23 of measles, followed by their little daughter Anna dying of the

same disease on the day of her mother’s burial. Then his second wife Rebecca

died at 29 of tuberculosis, followed by her youngest daughter’s death of the

same disease. Third wife Elizabeth, my father’s mother, died at 35 of

complications in giving birth to her fourth child. Poor Daniel came to believe he was

being punished for the way he turned his back on his first love, Fannie, and he

later apologized, not to her directly, as the story goes, but to her husband,

my grandfather Eli. Daniel also once admonished my father never to treat

Mary, my mom, the way he treated her mother Fannie. But I wonder, in spite of all

the pain in my Dad’s family, whether maybe God worked everything out for good,

just as promised.

                                * * *

According to the Center for Media and the Family (mediawise.org), the video

game industry is the fastest growing media phenomenon yet, with 2005 sales of

well over $10 billion in the U.S. alone, and billions more worldwide. A study

that year of over 2000 8 to 18 year olds found that 83% of them have access to

at least one video game player, and that half have one in their bedroom, with

12% reporting they play video games they know their parents disapprove of,

even though only 21% reported that their parents actually had any restrictions on

what they play. Not that there’s not a lot for parents to disapprove of and

be concerned about, given the fact that many of the most popular games are also

the most violent, and that reaching higher skill levels in many of the killer

and shooter games introduce players to ever higher levels of violence, often

including violence toward women, police officers and other authority figures.

What is of special concern is the fact that so many kids are investing so

much time in this kind of intense activity at the very stage in their lives when

their brains are still in the process of being wired together--in ways that

will profoundly affect them for the rest of their lives--because of the pace of

brain development that continues until around the mid 20’s. I know video games

aren’t the only media that are conditioning our young to disrespect life and

disrespect basic values most of us don’t want to buy into, but just turning

kids loose in a fast-paced, M-rated game world where sex and violence become

mere entertainment strikes me as a terribly bad idea.

                                        * * *

A couple of months ago I got one of those e-mails that are forwarded and

re-forwarded all over the place, this one supposedly based on the philosophy of

the late Charles Schultz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip. In it you are to

answer a series of trivia questions like, Name the 5 wealthiest people in the

world, name the last five Heisman trophy winners, name the last five winners of

the Miss America contest, ten people who are Nobel or Pulitzer prize

recipients, the last half dozen Academy Award winners, and so forth.

The point is that few of us can remember many of the people who have made

even recent headlines, even though they are considered the best in their fields.

Most of them have their short season of making big news, but then are pretty

much off the radar.

After you read the e-mail, you’re supposed to then respond to a second set of

questions:

List three friends you had when you were in school. Name five people who

taught you something worthwhile. Think of a half dozen people who have made you

feel appreciated and special, five people you enjoy spending time with, etc.

The exercise makes the point that its not the people with the most

credentials, the most impressive resumes, or who have the most money, who make the

greatest difference in our lives, or who most remembered. Its our friends, people

who care about us, take a personal interest in us, people we love, and turn to,

when we’re in distress. That kind of famous is something we all can become.

                                * * *

According to research done by the Barna Group, more and more religious people

are choosing not to attend traditional Sunday morning worship services in

favor of such settings as house churches, marketplace ministries and Internet

groups. As a member of a house church congregation myself, I can understand that

option. For the first several centuries congregations met mostly in the homes

of fellow believers--and since neither Saturdays nor Sundays were considered

days off in the Roman empire, Christians had to meet early on Saturday or on

the first day of the week or some time in the evening for their meals together

and for their fellowship, teaching and prayers. But I can’t imagine

experiencing real church on some Internet site, to fellowship together in some chat room

in place of actually meeting people face to face. What would be missing for me

is the element of touch, the handshake or embrace of greeting, of the actual

breaking of a loaf of bread and the sharing of a cup of wine or grape juice as

signs of Jesus’ presence, of laying on of hands in prayer or baptism or

commissioning, or of anointing a sick person with oil as a part of a prayer for

healing. Somehow, for me, you have to be together, to touch, whether in the

intimacy of a living room in the case of a house church or the joining of voices in

prayer and song in an specially built sanctuary. Being there, face to face,

with God and each other, is what makes church happen.

                                    * * *

"It is not surprising that most people believe global violence is on the

rise,” writes Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Center at the University

of British Columbia and former UN official. But, he says, “most people,

including many leading policy makers and scholars, are wrong. The reality is that,

since the end of the Cold War, armed conflict and nearly all other

forms of political violence have decreased. The world (as a whole) is

(actually) far more peaceful than it was." I found those words surprising, and

heartening, even though I don’t have as much faith as some in political institutions

being able to create and sustain a peaceful world. But I applaud any signs of

progress wherever and however they can be found, and I resonate with the

prayer song, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” Yes, let it

begin with each of us taking time to make friends of neighbors who are

different from us. Let peace begin in our homes and families, where we honor our

commitments to our spouses--and our children--and where we respect our aged, and

take care of those who need our help. Let peace begin with each of us

regularly giving generous gifts to help rebuild the ruins created by war and the

devastation of poverty and the destruction of natural disasters like hurricanes and

tornados.

                        * * *

Yes, let peace begin with you and me and spread all over this land and all

lands--and from sea to every shining sea. That’s my prayer.

In the book of Deuteronomy we are urged to influence our children every day

to love God with all their heart, soul and strength. And we are told to impress

God’s good commands on our children when we sit at home, when we walk along

the road, when we lie down and when we get up.

But in our typically busy schedules we may feel there are all too few

opportunities to have those kinds of one on one interchanges with our children. But I

ran across a quote from the Dallas Morning News which stated that children

today spend an average of over an hour a day in the car with one or both of

their parents, presenting a new set of opportunities for some good conversations

between generations on things that really matter. And I wondered, what if we

had our radios or cassette players turned off during more of our travel time,

and had our ears and minds open to what was going on in our children’s worlds.

What if we used more of those drive times to ask and answer questions about

important things like relationships, values, and beliefs. I’m convinced that we

are most effective in our parenting when we establish the kind of rapport with

our young that happens when we are not talking down to, or talking at, our

children, but with them, as concerned and caring adults they can trust. So

whether we are tucking them to bed or chatting over breakfast, or talking in the

car, those times have precious possibilities for great parenting.

                            * * *

My most recent nomination for sainthood is Ruth Mary Byler, who died in

November of 2001 at age 84. Ruth, never married, was a truly beautiful person from

the inside out, devoting most of her life in helping out in a little urban

church in Knoxville, Tennessee, making her living cleaning houses for two and

three days a week, and giving the rest of her time to visiting folks, helping

with weekly services, teaching Sunday School and Bible School classes, and having

a weekly Story Hour for the kids in her neighborhood. Her frugal lifestyle

meant she mostly got around mostly by city bus, which she saw as another

opportunity to meet and befriend people.

I was touched by some correspondence about her written by Clarice Anne

Forsyth after Ruth’s death, Clarice being a part of a struggling family of nine

children being raised by a single mother whom Ruth befriended. “Ruth was more than

a friend to us,” she said. “She would have us to her place for meals often

and after each of the nine of us married she would invite us to come with our

husbands or wives and children for dinner.... she celebrated our weddings and

graduations and made quilts for our babies... All of us attend church today,”

Clarice wrote, and added, “Today there are two nurses, three teachers, an

electrician and an office manager among the nine of us. But we are still the

Powers family who was so desperately poor and almost friendless in the 1950’s...

As long as any of us lives, we will remember Ruth Byler and value her and

everything she did for us.”

                                    * * *

When our director at FLRC, Ralph Steger, and his wife June moved to our area

from the Midwest they decided to leave their aging TV set behind, expecting to

replace it with something better after they settled in to their new home.

Turns out they began to like life without television so well they’ve decided not

to get one after all. “We’re not as depressed as we used to be from hearing

bad news all the time or as upset about the dismal kinds of entertainment

programming that makes up so much TV fare these days,” he says, then commented on

some feedback he had gotten in the Sunday School class he teaches at his

church, where some retired members were lamenting about how bad the world was

getting, how hopeless everything seemed. Then he asked them how much of the day they

had their television sets on, and a number of them reported they had programs

like Fox News and CNN on pretty much constantly during their waking hours.

“Try giving your TV a rest,” he told them, and encouraged them to engage in

other kinds of activities and interactions with people instead. He’s thinking

television news, rather than giving us a balanced picture of what the real

world is like, gives us only exposure to the awful and the sensational, ignoring

all of the good things and normal events that are going on all the time but

aren’t considered newsworthy. Thanks, Ralph, you may just be on to something all

of us should be giving more thought to.

                                    * * *

Dr. Tedd Mitchell , director of the Wellness Program in Dallas, Texas, writes

how when he was growing up, he would come home from school, eat a quick

snack, dash off his homework, and head outdoors. Today, he says, kids are more

likely to watch TV or play video games after school. As a result, he says, we have

double the number of overweight children and teens, and more than one in ten

2-5 year olds is obese. He attributes the problem to not only more screen

time, but the fact that less than one in ten middle schools and high schools

requires daily physical activity for students. He recommends that we all have more

leisurely meals together as families and not eat meals or snacks in front of

our television sets. When we eat more slowly we sense when we are full better

than when we rush through our meals. If we have to eat on the go, Dr. Mitchell

says, we should try to have low-fat and nutritious alternatives available for

ourselves and our children. The second key is to move more often and more

energetically, he says. He recommends we use step counters, and have as a goal to

reach a total of 10,000 brisk steps a day. I’m sure nothing Dr. Mitchell is

saying is new to any of us, but when something as important as our health, and

our children’s health and well-being, are at stake, its all worth repeating and

paying attention to.

                                        *  *  *

USA WEEKEND 1/13-15/06

Sixteen year old Maria Jose Perez, a junior at St. Thomas Aquinas High School

in Fort Lauderdale, in a prize winning “This I Believe” essay done for

National Public Radio, describes how devastated she felt over losing a middle

school election bid for student council vice-president one year, to a fellow

student whose parents had provided hundreds of nice pens with her opponent’s name on

them, something she and her family could have never afforded. She was

determined to try again when she got to high school, this time by overcoming her

shyness and making a deliberate effort to befriend as many students as possible.

She would greet everyone within arms reach, she said, try to remember their

names and their interests and their problems, and to follow up with showing an

interest in their ongoing lives as students. Sure enough, she said, by her

sophomore year, there were students calling out her name in the hall, seeking her

out to tell her about their crushes or how things were going at home. But just

as her plans for running for another elective office began to look more

promising, she discovered her motives for doing what she was doing had changed. She

no longer had the same desire to run for something in order to prove her worth

among her peers. She had learned to genuinely care about her classmates,

saying, “No words can adequately describe the feeling I get when a fellow student

smiles and is genuinely happy to see me.” USA WEEKEND 1/13-15/06

                                    * * *

According to the National Institute on Media and the Family’s website,

mediawise.org, the average fourth grade girl in this country in the mid-nineties

played video games for about 4.5 hours a week, with boys spending over 7 hours.

Today more and more games are available on mobile phones and on the Internet,

as well as on DVD’s that are available everywhere, often circulated and copied

and passed on from one friend to another. So ten years later, girls in this

same age group are playing them for nearly 6 hours a week, and boys an

astonishing 13.5 hours. Its interesting to note that boys these days, who spend more

time with media, including video games, are a part of a trend toward lower

academic performance than girls, and are at ever higher risk for obesity and for

addiction to the kind of stimulation they get from highly intense and exciting

video games. And as retired Lt. Colonel David Grossman points out in his study

of a science he calls killology, they are being trained in the same way

soldiers are conditioned to shoot and kill, a set of skills he says adolescents

don’t need to be learning. Not that all first person shooter games are going to

cause users to become Columbine style killers, he says, but studies to date do

show a connection between lots of use of these games and more aggressive

behavior and less respectful attitudes toward life and toward other human beings,

especially women.

                                * * *

The older I get, the more convinced I am that in the end, our real wealth,

our real worth, will not be counted by how much acclaim or net worth we’ve

accumulated, or how many admirers or fans we’ve had over the years, all assets that

will be forgotten over time, but its all about how many friends we’ve made

during our brief stay here, the kind of people we’ve cared about and who will

likely come to our funeral and will actually miss us when we’ve gone.

If you think of it, every other investment we make will deteriorate, get out

of date, lose its value, or can be taken from us. The only assets that endure

are people--friends and loved ones who have blessed us, and we them, all of

which makes the playing field for the most important form of wealth pretty

equal. It doesn’t take lots of capital or special talent to give our love away,

invest in others in the way Jesus did, in claiming his followers as his friends.

When all is said and done, what more could we really want?.

The chorus of a song by Michael W. Smith that I especially like goes:

“And friends are friends forever

If the Lord’s the Lord of them

And a friend will not say never

because the welcome will not end.

Though its hard to let you go

In the Father’s hand we know

That a lifetime’s not too long

To live as friends”

                        * * *

In a January 2006 Senate hearing on media regulation Dr. Jeff McIntyer of the

American Psychological Association made as clear and research-based a case as

any I have heard on how increased exposure to media violence causes increased

aggression on the part of children. Just as we don't know how many cigarettes

may result in a smoker getting cancer, he said, so we can't say exactly how

much exposure to screen based and other kinds of visual violence will result in

kids becoming afflicted with more aggressive and destructive behaviors, but

he insists that, on the basis of extensive research, the link is absolutely

clear. When the media of choice is first person killer games, the link is even

stronger, in that kids are actually engaging in virtual murder and mayhem as

they are exposed to ever more sophisticated digital images that add to the visual

impact of the violence. Retired Lt. Col. David Grossman cites cases of

teenage school shooters who killed with deadly efficiency even though most of them

had not had actual experience using firearms, but they had all had endless

training in video game murder, and knew that to get the most kills, you aimed for

the head, and used as many rounds as possible in the shortest time possible.

In first person killer games, this is what you learn to do in order to score

points and advance to the next skill level. Its time parents take the

responsibility to make sure that killing is never seen by children as just another way

to have some fun and excitement.

                            * * *

What kinds of touch and other expressions of affection are appropriate, and

what are not, among friends, coworkers and fellow members of congregations? All

of us are aware of shows of affection that have gone too far, of intimate

conversations and touching of a romantic kind that has gotten out of hand,

resulting in experiences of big time devastation and regret. On the other hand, many

of us, whether single, married, widowed, and perhaps aged or living alone,

may really need more of the kind of reassuring signs that they are valued and

cherished, including having a hand of blessing on an arm or shoulder, or even a

gracious hug among close members of a family, or family of faith.

The best kind of guideline I know is to go by the same unspoken rules that

apply to members of a healthy biological family. Individual family cultures may

differ somewhat, of course, I grew up in a family where I almost never got a

hug from anybody except my good mother, but most of feel some of that kind of

touch is healthy and appropriate in a nurturing family. At the same time, we

are also instinctively aware of needing to never cross a line into any kind of

incestuous behavior. We wouldn’t think of sneaking off somewhere for some kind

of hugging session with a sibling or close relative. And whatever affection we

show in our families is not based on the age, gender or physical

attractiveness of a person, and is always and only in public, fully accountable settings.

In that way it is not only safe, but can be one of the ways we can bless one

another in the context of a close knit spiritual family with good boundaries.

                    * * *

An unsung hero I recently read about is Dessie Miller, a Church of the

Brethren school teacher in the Harrisonburg area, who in the Jim Crow days of a

strictly segregated Virginia, got the permission of the trustees of Camp Bethel

south of Natural Bridge to bring three young African-American girls with her as

part of the staff for a week of camp in the summer of 1944. Gas was rationed

and she had to repair three well-worn tires on her prewar vehicle on the way.

When she stopped to call the camp to say she would be late, the camp manager

made the mistake of asking her, “Do you have the colored girls with you?”

Apparently, through a switchboard operator in Troutville and perhaps others who

heard the conversation on a multi-party phone line, the word spread that there

would be a mixing of races at Camp Bethel that week, and when Dessie and her

friends arrived, there was an angry group of neighbors and parents waiting for th

them, with the local sheriff blocking their entrance. After some negotiation,

they were allowed to stay until the Camp board could have an emergency meeting

to decide what to do. Details of the story vary, but when all was said and

done, the camp was closed for the rest of the season rather than risking the

consequences of violating Virginia law and the prejudices of people in the

community.

When it comes to race relations, we’ve come a long way since then, but not

without the courage and the setbacks suffered by people of faith like Dessie

Miller and her three young friends.

                            * * *

Back in the eighties anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin expressed the fear

that opening the floodgates of pornography would cause men to see every woman in

a sexually debased way, and treat them accordingly, so women would find

themselves ravished and raped as sex objects. Feminist Naomi Wolf, with whom I

sometimes disagree, laments the fact that in a day when pornography has become a

major teacher of what sex is, how it looks and how its done, it is actually

having some of the opposite affect, that it is deadening the male libido in

relation to real women, whom they begin to see as simply inferior porn. Real women,

who come in a wide variety of body styles, and who aren’t downloadable and

then deleteable at will, and who aren’t dying to have instant sex with whatever

male body may be at hand, are seen as just not being exciting enough to satisfy

today’s pornographized expectations. So the young women Wolf talks to on

college campuses feel they can never measure up, that even being willing to go to

bed with a guy isn’t enough in a day when sex, like the fast food industry, is

about everything being super packaged and super sized, where the more

appetites are stimulated by poor-quality material, the more junk it takes to satisfy

you, and the more unhealthy you become. So, concludes Wolfe, “the reason to

turn off porn might become, for thoughtful people... a physical- and

emotional-health one... in the same way that, to become an athlete, you rethink your

smoking.... e.g., Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity.” New

Yorker magazine, 2003

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/index1.html

In a book called The War Against Parents, Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West

note that “non market work” that is, work that doesn’t earn money or produce

a marketable product, is given little value in our profit-driven society. And

that parenting, of course, is seen as the ultimate kind of non market

activity. This means that any parent who either decides not to hold down a full time

job--for the sake of spending more time teaching and nurturing their kids--has

to be almost apologetic about it. Its just not seen as adequately fulfilling

or rewarding, especially as those same parents are buying into the notion that

they have to have larger and larger homes and more and more electronic

and other gadgets for themselves and for their children, to say nothing of

having them enrolled in a high prestige university when they reach college age. Few

parents see themselves as the uniquely influential “professors” they really

are in the life-shaping “university” of their children’s pre-school world.

Hewlett and West also believe we should support legislation that would make it

more difficult for parents with children to divorce. “Instead of serving as a

mechanism through which adults express their commitment to others--especially

children,” they write, “marriage has become a vehicle for the emotional

fulfillment of adult partners.” They believe this thinking needs to be changed in

favor of adding to the sense of responsibility parents feel for their most

important assignment, raising healthy, unselfish and responsible children.

                            * * *

In the January 2006 issue of Sojourners magazine, sociologist Amitai Etzioni

is cited as saying that since the early 70’s the “parenting industry” has

lost most of its work force, citing the fact that today fewer than 40% of the

mothers and virtually none of the fathers of children three and younger are

willing to sacrifice any significant amount of their earning hours to take care of

their young at a time when their kids are learning the most about how to

become good, responsible and productive human beings. Much of that day to day care

and attention is being provided by underpaid and poorly trained day care

workers, he says, who may or may not be genuinely invested in providing the kind of

love and guidance associated with great parenting. Etzioni admits that the

traditional nuclear family of the 50’s was oppressive of women, its just that we

still haven’t come up with an alternative model for child rearing that seems

to work as well as that more traditional one. For all its flaws, he says, we

didn’t have school shootings back then, no epidemics of Attention Deficit

Hyperactivity Disorder or juvenile diabetes, teen suicide rates were lower, half of

what they are today, and academic achievement higher. Interestingly, he notes

that American employers complain that today's young workers suffer from “a

deficiency of character and an inability to control impulses, defer

gratification and commit to the task at hand.”

Sounds a lot like the generation of their parents who’ve focused too much on

getting more things and lack commitment to the task of mentoring and caring

for their young.

                        * * *

Danny and Polly Duncan Collum, in an article in the 2006 Sojourners magazine

called Taking Back Our Kids, laments the fact that our children are the focus

of massive ad campaigns aimed at one thing, getting our young people hooked on

consumerism and materialism, regardless of the effect on their health, values

or sense of well-being. They refer to Sociologist Juliet Schor’s finding that

at least one marketing firm “gets girls to organize slumber parties for

research purposed. Girls may be given a new TV show to watch, or a food to try, and

their responses are collected. It’s basically a focus group,” she says.

Schor has also stressed how certain products are promoted even in schools, and her

studies show that materialism is associated with children’s depression, low

self-esteem, and poor relationships with parents. The Duncan Collums article

also notes a Wall Street Journal report of a number of years ago that revealed

that some of the rise of Britney Spears popularity came about by adult

marketers pretending to be twelve year old girls and chatting online about how cool

Britney was, and how great her music was. “Unless parents find a way to get off

the consumerist merry-go-round,” the article goes on to say, “they will never

reclaim control of their family life and reestablish healthy connections with

their children. To do so will require getting control of our own ‘needs’ and

limiting our children’s exposure to commercial culture.”

Without a doubt, rearing healthy, god-fearing children today has become a

countercultural activity.

                        * * *

Feminist writer Naomi Wolfe, in an article in a 2003 New Yorker magazine,

laments that when she became of age in the seventies it was still considered

“pretty cool to be able to offer a young man with the actual presence of an

unclad, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked

(nude) women than there were (such) naked women on the market....(and) Thirty

years ago simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that

entered mainstream consciousness.” But all that has changed, she says, with

today’s kinds of pornography that introduces exotic forms of sexual deviancy as

being normal and expected, and female partners now being expected to think, look,

and perform like porn stars. Today, as a wiser, middle aged woman, Wolfe has

developed a more sober perspective. “If you associate orgasm with your wife, a

kiss, a scent, a soft body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; (but)

if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images

of cybersex slaves, that is what will turn you on,” and adds, “the power and

charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is

not ‘on tap’ all the time,” and she even refers to the text in the Hebrew

Bible that says, “rejoice in the wife of your youth...let her breasts satisfy you

always.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our young people could begin all their thinking

with that kind of perspective in mind, rather than being led down a path of

disillusionment and disappointment that robs them of the wonderful kind of

intimacy only a good marriage can provide?

                        * * *

For a recent seminar on the theme, From Tablets of Stone to an Information

Explosion, I created a timeline going back to the time of the lawgiver Moses,

around 1290 BC to the present, noting that the major advance in means of

communication in his time was from words carved on clay and stone tablets to the use

of papyrus, an early version of paper. The next major development, after the

use of hand carved or etched print blocks to make multiple copies, was in the

early 1400s, nearly 3000 years later, with Gutenberg’s printing press with

moveable type. Even then, books were expensive and newspapers and magazines were

not generally affordable to the masses. Even a mere hundred years ago, in the

homes my parents grew up in in rural Kansas, before the availability of

electricity or telephones, or the invention of radio or TV, the only communication

media they had were a handful of books, including a few Bibles and hymnbooks,

and the occasional newspaper brought from town. So in this past century more

changes have taken place in terms of a virtual onslaught of media than happened

in all of history since the first messages were carved on stone or on clay

tablets. Today each of us could, in theory, probably access more stuff right in

the privacy of our own homes than is housed in the entire Library of Congress.

When Walter Bruggeman speaks of a need for a pedagogy of saturation when it

comes to teaching our children our faith and values, I have to ask, how are we

going to counter the saturation of all of the other kinds of counter messages

coming at our families from all sides?

                        * * *

Margie Vlasits, a dear friend and a member of our house church, has blessed

us in the faith she’s shown since being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form

of bone cancer. Of course she’s had her share of angry and distressed

feelings, too, but four months into the experience, in an e-mail update to her long

list of friends, she wrote, “.... Each day I realize even more how valuable

relationships are. ..What a way to learn what is really important in life... A

couple weekends ago, we had the honor of spending a weekend with four wonderful

friends who have committed themselves to be open and honest and supportive...

through many of our life struggles... We went through child rearing, family

struggles, and church struggles, and we have laughed, cried, screamed, prayed

and just listened to each other, in addition to confronting and challenging

each other. Through e-mails, cards, and phone calls....we are (still) close...

How blessed we are. I hope that each of you feel free to tell us your low

spots and let us be close to you in them.

She ended her email with this piece by Dawna Markova:

I will not die an unlived life.

I will not live in fear

Of falling or catching fire.

I choose to inhabit my days,

To allow my living to open me,

To make me less afraid,

More accessible

To loosen my heart

Until it becomes a wing,

A torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance:

To live

So that which came to me as seed

Goes to the next as blossom

And that which came to me as blossom

Goes on as fruit.

                        * * *

My sister-in-law, Freda Zehr, recently sent us some email reflections on some

of the miracles she sees in her life, not necessarily spectacular,

sensational ones, but the everyday wonders that move her. In her own words,

“I find it a miracle each spring as I see my one bush of bleeding hearts I

planted years and years ago from my sisters plants, which she in turn got from

my mother’s own garden. As those heart shaped flowers take on their exquisite

color and their strands of beauty gracefully bend toward the ground, I think

of my mother each time I pass them, it feels like a part of her lives on--my

miracle.”

“I find a miracle in looking back over our nearly fifty years of marriage and

still finding my heart skipping a beat when I see him walking down the

driveway and find that not only do I love him as much as I did these many years

ago, but even more. I heard someone say that as you age, your loves loses the

excitement of youth and takes on the steadiness of age. Yes, the steadiness is

there, but, he is still the romantic love of my life...

Finally, “I find it a miracle as I look into the innocent faces of my

grandchildren and even more of a miracle as I see my own eyes in theirs at times, and

know that part of "living on" is our faith, our love our ideals living on in

them just as our physical features do.”

2006 - Series 2

1. My wife’s niece, Mary Ann Yutzy, the mother of five grown children, wrote the following soon after the loss of her dearly beloved 76-year-old father (our brother-in-law): My days hold much joy that defies description or explanation. The ...cardinals at the feeder outside my sliding glass door. Their splashes of red against the gray (sky) never fail to brighten my day.  An X-ray technician whose understanding heart was like a drink of water to a dry and thirsty soul. Her own losses, so recent, made her quiet and gentle, and so, so careful of my grief.  An office tech at the doctor's office who chose not to give me a hassle, but openheartedly and generously changed the orders without requiring another appointment. And smiled.  Clean, warm sheets on a bed...being able to settle in with a quiet contentment.... And the satisfying joy of relationships. Good-natured exchanges with friends. All the blessings that friendships bring. I have been so blessed.  For the love of my sisters, the love of my brothers, the love of my Mama... And the steady joy of having a Heavenly Father who cares, who goes way beyond the ordinary to show His love for us. He hears my complaints, He listens and counts my tears. But ... He INHABITS my praise.

2. On my way to a nearby campus to talk with some college students about relationships, the image of the familiar food pyramid came to mind, where at the base there are the basic breads and cereals, then a large layer for fruits and vegetables, a smaller one for meats and cheeses, and at the peak of the pyramid some space for fats and sweets, for the desserts.  I thought, we should have a similar relationship pyramid that might have as its broad base the daily bread of unconditional love and lots of God-given joy, peace, patience, kindness, and self-control. This would help us respect and care about others regardless of whether we, or they, are having a good day, and to always treat the other as we would have them treat us.  The large middle layer of the pyramid would be for the everyday entrees of companionship and friendship, for the enjoyment of just being together, working together, listening and sharing with each other.  The erotic, romantic part of the pyramid would be the little peak at the top. I reminded the students that even the most amorous spouses spend only a fraction of their time in that mode, but are together mostly in very ordinary, everyday kinds of activities. If they’re not good friends, don’t enjoy just being together, they’re going to have a very boring and unsatisfying life. Unfortunately, our society has sold us on desserts as the main course. But without the solid foundation of friendship and of agape love underneath it all, it can make our relationships fragile and unhealthy.

3. My wife’s sister Freda Zehr sent us the following about four-year-old Dax, her grandson, who upon seeing a picture in the paper of a football star planning to enlist in the army told his grandmother, “The reason I don't want to be a soldier is because I wouldn't know who the bad guys or the good guys are, so I might shoot the wrong person. And I wouldn’t want to even shoot a bad guy, anyway.”  Then he said, in a voice that suggested an urgent note of ‘I hope so, I hope so,’ “There is never any war in this country. It’s only over in countries where there are no children. "Because the reason you can't have a war where children live is because you might kill them by accident."  Then, "Oh yes, I forgot, there was a war once in this country, but that was before any children lived here, because I saw the cannon down in Harrisonburg.  They shot big things out of it, but it didn’t hit any children because there were no children living here then. It was about a million years ago." "And you know,” he concluded, “You have to be tall to be a soldier, like uncle Jay (who is 6’ 4”). I will be too short to be a soldier, because my mom is short and my daddy is not tall." Anyway, all the wars will be over by the time I grow up, right Grandma?" To which she replied, a little shaken, "Dax, I really hope so."  If only we could truly be able to assure Dax there would never be war where there were children. Meanwhile, he’s trying convince himself that sensible, caring adults would never let that happen.

4. Seems like there’s a lot of church shopping and church hopping going on these days, perhaps sometimes for good reasons. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether it may also reflect a kind of consumer mindset where we keep looking for the best spiritual bargains, checking out where we can get the most possible benefits for ourselves and our family. That’s not all bad, in that we do want our church to be a good fit, to somewhat meet our needs, but we are also called to be about creating the kind of church that can meet the needs of others in the hungry and hurting world beyond us--and not just be in it for what we can get personally. Tim Stafford, in an article in the January 2005 issue of Christianity Today, tells the joke about a man who is rescued after spending 20 years on a deserted island. His rescuer is amazed that he’s built several impressive structures during his twenty year stay. “Wow,” the rescuer says, “What’s that beautiful stone building overlooking the bay?” “That’s my home,” says the castaway. “And what’s that building over there with the spires?” “That’s my church.” “Well then, what’s the other building with the bell tower?” “That,” he replied, “is the church I used to belong to.” In real life, maybe most folks wouldn’t leave a church in which they were the only member. On the other hand, we might just be the very member of our congregation that’s giving us the most trouble.

5. I’ve long held the view that individual nuclear families need the help and support of a larger faith family, a caring congregation, to help them thrive, especially during times of stress. But even in good times we can benefit from having a kind of spiritual “extended family” in place that can be an encouraging and positive influence for our children, folks who reinforce our values and bless and nurture us and our offspring. Tim Stafford, in an article in Christianity Today entitled, “The Church, Why Bother?” makes the point that a New Testament based faith will see being a part of a visible and accountable “body of Christ” not an optional thing, but part and parcel of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. If it didn’t exist, we’d need to help create it.  Stafford cites the third century North African bishop Cyprian as saying, “He is not a Christian who is not in Christ’s church... He (or she) cannot have God for his Father who has not the church for his/her mother.”  To those of us who have grown up in an age of so much emphasis on individualism, that may seem like an unwelcome and foreign idea, but one we need to think about. We are created for relationships, and not just marital and family ones.  Of course we could all give examples of where the church has been an oppressive or unfaithful “mother,” but in the end, it is pretty much whatever we members make it. And whatever problems it has needs to become a part of our mission to help repair and resolve, not just things to run away from.

6. A growing number of American teens, now estimated at some one million, are into some form of self-mutilation, or cutting, according to psychologist Matthew Seligman, author of the book, Working With Self-Harming Adolescents. These kids are not necessarily suicidal, they’ve just developed an addictive need to take a razor or some sharp instrument and cut or scratch skin on their arms, legs or other parts of their bodies until they bleed and are left with marks. This is a phenomenon that is extremely hard to understand, and should never be considered acceptable under any circumstances, says Dr. Seligman, but he also cautions parents against making the problem worse by overreacting to it and risking driving the behavior further underground.  A lot of the spread of this disturbing trend is through peer pressure--kids influencing other kids--but it happens only where there is already something deeply troubled going on in a teenager’s mind or his or her life, according to Seligman and others. Most cutters describe it as giving them relief from the feelings of numbness or emotional pain they are experiencing, and as somehow adding to their feeling of being in control of their distresses and turmoils. At any rate, it’s a serious cry for help we can’t afford to ignore, but must respond to in a firm, calm and compassionate way, seeking professional help as needed, especially for the depression that typically goes with it.

7. One writer I’ve benefited from has been Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spent many months in prison and was finally executed because of his active opposition to Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Party before and during World War II. While I strongly disagree with his finally becoming so desperate to remove this madman from office that he felt he needed to became part of a plot to assassinate him, I can understand and appreciate the moral agony he went through in making that decision. Our responsibility is to think prayerfully and courageously about how to respond to the many evils in the world and times we live in, and like Bonhoeffer, to be willing to make hard and costly choices, if needed, to respond in the way we believe Jesus would, which I believe would be with nonviolence.  Already in 1933, when most German church leaders and their congregations were giving their unquestioned support to Hitler and were turning a blind eye to his actions aimed at exterminating Jews and other minorities, Bonhoeffer wrote in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, “Like ravens we have gathered around the carcass of cheap grace. From it we have imbibed the poison which has killed the following of Jesus among us... A people became Christian...but at the cost of discipleship, at an all-too-cheap price...We poured out rivers of grace without end, but the call to rigorously follow Christ was seldom heard.” Hard words, but words we still need to hear and heed today.

8. Christopher Buckley, son of political commentator William Buckley, is the author of a best selling satirical book, Thank You For Smoking, which was made into a movie in 2006. Buckley writes about people who work as lobbyists and public relations persons for enterprises that can cause harm, and even death to people--as in the tobacco, alcohol and gun industries. In a March, 2006, segment on the PBS program NOW, he describes an interview he had years ago with a seemingly well put together spokesperson for the now defunct Tobacco Institute. As she sat at her desk in her elegantly furnished office, casually smoking a cigarette, he asked her how she justified being in her kind of work, to which she replied, candidly, “I have to have some way to pay the mortgage,” which got Buckley wondering to himself how much of the evil in the world is being perpetrated in the name of “paying the mortgage.” “If that’s the underlying problem,” he mused, with tongue in cheek, “maybe we should all just rent.” This does raise the question, In what ways, and for what reasons, are we willing to sell our soul, or at least our values, our well-being, or the life and well-being of others, for the bottom line, to be able to afford our dream house, or to put our children through college, or to build a retirement nest egg for ourselves, regardless of the effects of our work on the environment, or on other people, or on future generations? Rather than spend our working days doing more harm than good, maybe it would be better to just rent.

9. A chilling AP article in our local paper (DNR 1/20/06) described a series of incidents of homeless folks in the Fort Lauderdale area being beaten by young people who are attacking them at random as a cruel kind of sport. According to the Washington based National Coalition for the Homeless, there have been nearly 400 documented cases of such brutality, usually involving white males under 20 armed with baseball bats, rocks, or just fists and feet, and involving 156 deaths over a six year period. Sadly, the numbers appear to be on the increase, says Michael Stoops, executive director of the coalition. “They (the kids) do this because they can, can get away with beating a homeless person and nobody will care, and the homeless won’t be able to fight back.” And, in fact, many victims may never report the crimes done against them, but simply try to find other, safer places to spend the night. “You’ve got to sleep and be half awake at night,” one homeless man is reported as saying. Maybe some more of us need to experience some sleeplessness in trying to figure out what motivates young people to behave this way. Where does their rage come from? What are they missing by way of having their own most basic needs met for good role models, being loved and cared for as kids, and growing up with some good tough-love boundaries and correction? And what role does our increasingly violent media/entertainment culture play in this awful problem?

10. According to a February 2006 Washington Post story, many of today’s soldiers are finding that the hours they spent playing first person shooter video games helped prepare them for the real thing. One 29-year old combat engineer, whose all time favorite games were “Halo 2” and “Full Spectrum Warrior,” (the latter developed with help from the U.S. Army) describes one of his first combat experiences, “The insurgents were firing from the other side of the bridge... We called in a helicopter for an air strike. ...It was like ‘Halo’ but it was real.” Rear Admiral Fred Lewis, a 33-year Navy veteran who heads the trade group that puts on the military counterpart to the glitzy Electronic Entertainment Expo, is quoted as saying, “The soldiers we’re training now are the children of the digital age who grew up with GameBoys.... Live training on the field is still done, of course, but using simulations to train them is not only natural, it’s necessary.”  But retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson cautions, “Remember the days of old Sparta, when everything the Spartans did was towards war? In many ways, the soldiers of this video game generation have replicated that,” and then he adds that many of the soldiers he’s worked with were “on more intimate terms with the culture of video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than with their own families,” but, he adds, when they actually shot people, especially innocent people, ...I saw guys break down. The violence they saw in video games hadn’t prepared them for this.”

11. A 2006 Parents Television Council report finds that children are exposed to darker and more realistic forms of violence in cartoon programs than ever before, 6.3 incidents an hour, actually more than found in prime time programs aimed at adults. Programs like the Cartoon Network’s “Teen Titans” and ABC’s “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” are especially graphic, often featuring “intense fights with swords, guns and lasers.” In one reported scene in Fox’s “Shaman King” two characters have a long sword fight, one character is knocked out by a blow to the head, and his opponent reaches into the chest of his screaming victim and pulls out his “soul,” leaving him dead. Parents Television Council’s founder Brent Bozell makes a distinction between “Tom and Jerry” forms of fanciful violence and the hard, dark violence that can create anxiety in kids, or which, according to Dr. Michael Rich of Harvard Medical School’s Center of Media and Children’s Health, desensitizes them to where they come to believe violence is even more prevalent--and more acceptable, than it is in real life.  Meanwhile, the Cartoon Network’s response to the study is to announce that “we are confident that our standards-and-practices policies ensure that the programming on our air is age-appropriate... (and) suitable for their intended viewers.  If it were up to me to make choices about what programs kids like my own grandchildren can watch, I would take that kind of self-serving statement with a huge grain of salt. (AP, DNR 3/3/06)

12. According to some 2005 numbers, approximately 56% of 13- to 17-year-olds now carry cell phones, up from only 5% five years earlier. Is that a good thing? According to a piece written by Greg LaPlant in a recent supplement on children and youth in our local paper, some schools have begun tolerating cell phones as long as they are turned off during class, while some, as in the entire Detroit, Michigan school system, have banned them outright, seeing them as a disruption and a distraction to what school is all about--and their middle and high school principals are confiscating them at an average rate of four a day.  There is of course the obvious convenience of children being able to notify their parents as to where they are, or where and when they need a ride to or from somewhere, and in an emergency, its always good to be able to be in touch. But cell phones are increasingly becoming a status thing, and are used for lots of text messaging, playing games, taking and showing pictures, listening to MP3’s, as in nonstop music, and get this, even to access Internet pornography on the more sophisticated phones available today. Sometimes I’m glad we were able to raise our children in at least somewhat simpler times, in the 70’s and 80’s, but all of us need to think together about how to use what kinds of technologies in ways that truly enhance life and enrich relationships--in ways that are healthy for all of us. (DNR supplement,2/28/06)

13. According to writer Peggy Perdue, a recent study done by Synovate researchers found that 43% of parents say they want to be their child’s best friend, while 65% of teens believe their parents are trying to be their friends. There is certainly evidence that when children look up to their parents and have a good relationship with them, that they are much more likely to turn to them when they have a problem rather than just keeping it to themselves, or simply turning to their peers for help. What sometimes happens is that when parents who feel guilty for not spending enough time with their kids, and are trying too hard to be liked by them, that they may neglect other aspects of parenting like setting good boundaries and having fair consequences for bad behaviors.  Unfortunately, the piece I read by Perdue was headlined, “Being a Parent vs. Being a Friend,” as though the two could not coexist, when in fact her article suggests we combine this new kind of friendship with traditional roles of parenting, and that we still insist on our right and responsibility to say “no” to our children when we need to. Or as local columnist Luann Austin wrote in our local paper only several days later, “If you respect your kids, are honest with them and like them, you won’t have to try to be their friend. You will be.” What a blessing it would be if that kind of parental respect would result in our children and teens feeling free to confide in us when they face a problem for which they need some serious help.

14. According to a UCLA study, 52% of their college freshmen say they frequently attended a religious service before attending college, but by their junior year, only 29% reported doing so. If that isn’t enough to cause some concern, The Center for Youth and Family Ministry (CYFM) at Fuller Seminary offers the troubling statistics that of 69 students reporting with a church background, out of 234 to whom they had sent a survey, all of them had consumed alcohol, 69% had been involved in some kind of sexual encounter, and 20% reported having 40 or more sexual encounters (with the same or multiple partners) in the last12 months. I don’t have stats as to how these numbers compare to young adults who attend a Christian college, but I think all of us would agree that being away from home and from ones home congregation for the first time, is a faith testing experience. One Christian college student, in reflecting on this, wrote, “I went to college feeling totally ready, excited to just get away and do something new..., not realizing that I was entering into the most intense battle I’ve experienced yet in life. Spiritually, mentally, relationally…in every aspect…my freshman year was a battle.” Not everyone’s experience will be the same, of course, but one thing does remains constant, for young adults and older ones as well--all of us will always need good support and encouragement, at any life stage, as we examine our faith and live it out in the kind of anything-goes and anything-can-be-believed kind of world we live in. Youth Group Kids Drop God in College (battlecry.com) Is there life with Christ after high school?

15. Luanne Austin, in a column “Respect, Honesty, Love (are) Key to Befriending Kids” in our local daily, speaks of the importance of our modeling the values and behaviors we want our offspring to live by. “So if you’re trying to teach teens to not be materialistic or wear the brands everyone else is wearing, take a look at yourself. Are you hung up on buying Eddie Bauer, Harley-Davidson, Lexus or Gloria Vanderbilt?” ...And if the values being portrayed in the movies and TV shows they (your children) watch are not your values, maybe you shouldn’t watch them.” “Kids hate hypocrisy,” she went on to say, “Dad lectured me about smoking marijuana but he drank too much. Mom lectured me about cigarettes, but she smoked two packs a day. If you’re trying to instill some good character in them (your kids), you’d better be living it yourself or at least trying to, and sharing your struggle with them, apologizing when you fail.” I totally agree that it’s not hypocritical to try to keep our children from repeating mistakes we’ve made in the past, nor do we need to have reached perfection as adults in order to avoid the hypocrisy label. But. like her, I agree we need to be honest with them, admit our own shortcomings--then explain why we are working to overcome them. If there’s one thing I’ll always appreciate my father for, its his being a big enough man to admit to us when he had done something he later regretted.

16. The February 13, 2005 issue of TIME magazine featured an article with the headline, “Happiness Isn’t Normal.” It’s about a best selling book by a University of Nevada professor, Steven Hayes, co-authored by Spencer Smith, in which he says the American obsession with feeling good is preventing us from living good--and that if we aim to truly live well, we can expect as much pain as happiness. Hayes calls his approach "acceptance and commitment therapy," and advises folks not to fight negative feelings but to accept them as part of life. The first sentence of his book is "People suffer," and he goes on to say, “Life includes a big chunk of pain, and it includes a big chunk of living. But if you're not willing to have the pain, you're not going to get the living.”  He adds, "We don't get good training in how to sit with pain anymore; [we used to have] spiritual traditions of fasting, where you didn't eat even though you were hungry in order to connect with the suffering of other people. Most of those traditions are gone. Now it's only the educated elite who go for 10-day silent meditation retreats who get that kind of experience.”  While Hayes isn’t necessarily writing from a religious perspective, some of it sounds a lot like some things I read in the New Testament, like “Blessed are those who mourn,” and “Blessed are those who suffer persecution for doing what’s right,” and “Those who seek to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, will find it.”

17. Writer Rebecca Traister, in an interview with Psychologist Steven Hayes of the University of Nevada and co-author of the best-selling book, "Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life," quotes Hayes as saying, “We have to ask why it is that we have (so much) substance abuse and addiction, self-control problems and even suicide when most people say they're happy. It's because most people aren't living the ways they want to be living, and that comes from how they're managing their own pain... Western culture promotes feel-goodism. In part it's a side effect of having technology to make things easier or feel better. It's natural progress, so we don't have to do the sweaty, hard things our forebears had to do,” he says, “But inside that is a meta-message, which is that you're supposed to feel good from morning to night. And on top of that, add commercialism and medications--If you consume the right products, eat the right pill, drink the right beer, drive the right car, you believe that you're not going to feel anything you don't like. What I'm saying is that that is not the definition of a meaningful life, and I'm saying people know it.  (So) “What I would do with a client is help them learn what their values are. And... when I say, "What do you want your life to be about?" I've never had somebody say, "What I want to be is the driver of an SUV."    (Instead) What they tell me are things like, "I want to contribute to other people" and "I want to be a loving person." And that, Hayes says, is what it means to “live good.’

18. "It is foolishness and a public madness to fill the cupboards with clothing, and allow men (human beings) who are created in God's image and likeness to stand naked and trembling with the cold so that they can hardly hold themselves upright." These words are from a fourth century sermon by one John of Antioch, a straightforward and uncompromising preacher and later bishop who became known as John Chrysostom--which means "golden mouth." But his eloquent preaching, considered the best in the early church, eventually got him in trouble, and led to his exile and untimely death. John delivered his fiery sermons to congregations who, after years of experiencing persecution, now enjoyed the official blessing of the government, and he spared no words in denouncing things like abortion, prostitution, gluttony, the theater, and swearing. About the love of the popular sport of horse racing, he complained, "My sermons are applauded merely from custom, then everyone runs off to [the races] again and gives much more applause to the jockeys, showing indeed unrestrained passion for them! ... No one thinks any more of my sermons, nor of the holy and awesome mysteries that are accomplished here." Bishop John’s straight talking bluntness finally made him too many enemies--in the imperial family and even among fellow bishops--and John was eventually denounced as a heretic and sent into exile. I wonder what would happen if we preached and practiced the same kind of boldness in addressing moral issues of our day!

19. Randy Salzman, Charlottesville-based doctoral candidate and a former journalism professor, in an article in Eighty-One magazine entitled “Growing Up Stupid,” is afraid our culture is suffering from having a generation of young people who have been programmed to “Just do it!’ and more recently, “Blink. Don’t Think.” “Kids have always done stupid things,” he says, but he wonders if we’re promoting a new level of irrational and impulsive thinking and behaving. Generally speaking, he says, advertisers and broadcast media don’t want consumers to use their brains but to simply buy now--or use or get now--and do any regretting later, urging us to join the “Pepsi Generation,” to “Supersize” everything, and “Spice up the Night,” even though it may lead to obesity and diabetes, or to live with the mindset of one Northwestern fraternity that sells T-shirts that say, “Freshmen Girls, Get ‘Em While They’re Skinny,” in spite of the possibility that it might get young men who act from that kind of mindset behind bars for rape. In a recent issue of James Madison University’s The Breeze, I couldn’t help noticing a little item in a personal section called Darts and Pats, in which a sadder and wiser student lamented, “A ‘what-in-the-world-was-I-thinking?’ dart to myself for the stupid Spring Break mistakes I made,” signed, From a junior who wishes she couldn’t remember all the dumb stuff she had done.

20. Barbara Pleasant has a great review of Richard Louv’s book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder,” in the Feb-March 2006 issue of Mother Earth magazine. “After-school hours once spent climbing trees or sloshing along stream banks are now used by clicking away in front of a computer,” she writes, “Nature is taught in schools and appears regularly on TV, but children rarely experience it first hand.” Louv’s book cites study after study that show that hands-on involvement with the great out of doors can increase children’s creativity, attention spans, and their ability to concentrate. He suggests that when looking for a house, the availability of hiking and biking trails nearby may be just as important as getting the best real estate deal or being in the best school system. He also recommends inexpensive camping trips, unplugging our TV sets and computers, making a garden, going fishing, and just lying on the ground and looking up at the night sky. Pleasant thinks that if children came with an instruction manual, that some of those ideas might appear on page one. Reading this reminded me of all of the unforgettable, unprogrammed times I had growing up on our farm when I spent hours, alone or with a friend or family member, just roaming, wading, climbing, watching birds and other wildlife, building dams in the little stream that ran through our pasture, and having some of the best times of my life in God’s great out-of-doors. I just hope my grandchildren can enjoy some of the same benefits.

21. Our family was saddened to hear of the death of Peter Wagler, one of my older cousin's grandsons, who enlisted to serve in Iraq at age 17. He and his family were active members of the Berean Baptist Church of Hutchinson, KS, and although Peter's parents were personally opposed to his choice, they nevertheless signed for him to go, and he became a part of the crew of an M1A2 Abrams tank in Company D, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Brigade Combat Team in Iraq. He was killed January 23, 2006, along with a fellow crew member, when a roadside bomb tore into the most vulnerable area of the tank. Young Peter was buried near Hutchinson, Kansas, February 10, on what would have been his 19th birthday. Home schooled, he was known as bright and precocious, always wanting to be where the action was. According to his father, when Peter went in he was talking about a military career, but as his first year went by he began to talk about other interests he wanted to pursue after he came home. While I didn't personally know Peter, I guess this was the closest relative of mine to be a casualty in war, and in the weekly e-mail to my adult children in which I shared this story, I included the following prayer by Cardinal John Henry Newman: [in the book, Prayer in All Things] MAY GOD SUPPORT US all the day long, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over and our work is done, then in his mercy may he give us a safe lodging and a holy rest and peace at the last. I still mourn the untimely passing of my cousin, twice removed, so much in the prime of his life.

22. On Feb. 9, 2006, a full page ad appeared in The New York Times with the headline: "Our commitment to Jesus Christ compels us to solve the global warming crisis." This groundbreaking and somewhat ambitious statement announced a new Evangelical Climate Initiative, and was signed by 86 well known evangelical leaders, including the presidents of 39 Christian colleges. It marks the emergence of a growing number of establishment Christian groups, including the National Association of Evangelicals, beginning to speak out on the long neglected issue of creation care. Leading the way has been Rich Cizik, NAE Vice President for Governmental Affairs, who was quoted by The Times as saying, "I don't think God is going to ask us (so much) how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created." From my perspective, it may well be that God is concerned about both, but its certainly true that, as a poster I saw once stated, “Good planets are hard to find,” which means that in a time when glaciers in arctic regions are breaking up at an unprecedented rate, we’d all better start taking this issue more seriously, and to take a look at lifestyle choices that are more likely to leave a good earth behind for our children and their great grandchildren to enjoy. Certainly God would have us care for the physical earth with the same kind of respect as he would have us show in caring for our physical bodies.

23. I spoke with a young wife and mother not long ago who told me about an experience of going with her grandmother to her grandfather’s grave. There the good grandmother, with the grief of her husband’s loss heavy on her heart, told her granddaughter, “Here we are at a place where its too late to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and we can no longer say, ‘I love you.’ Everything that’s been said and done, or that's been left unsaid or not done, remains in place, buried.” This made a profound impression on the young woman who shared this with me. “I decided then and there,” she said, “that I would never let a day go by without telling my husband and my children how much I love them, and that I’d always do my best to keep my accounts short, and never let the sun go down with an unresolved or unforgiven issue between me and the people I love, if I could help it.” What a great thing for all of us to think about, along with the words of poet William Voires I ran across some time ago, “Life is too brief, Between the budding and the falling leaf... for hate and spite... Life is too swift, Between the blossom and the white snow’s drift... For bitter words... Life is too great, Between the infant’s and the (grown) man’s estate... for petty things...”  Good words to remember well before we visit the remains of our loved ones in a cemetery, where it is too late to say ‘I’m sorry,’ and where we can no longer say, ‘I love you.’

24. Rabbi Arthur Waskow spoke to his congregation recently about the signs of a modern Passover he sees as happening in the streets of America. It’s coming, he says, not from a written book, but from the hearts, minds, legs, and prayers of a people mostly of Hispanic origin, and is happening in Spanish rather than in Hebrew. He was referring to the more than 2 million people who were taking to the streets demonstrating against what they saw as modern day Pharaohs advocating making it a felony to live in the U.S. without proper documentation, as well as making it equally criminal to feed, house, educate, or comfort such people. They are also deploring the building of more and higher walls between Mexico and the US, with orders for armed border patrols to kill anyone attempting to cross. This, the rabbi claims, is a mindset not unlike the ancient Egyptian kings who ordered the murder of the male children of a people whose name, "Hebrews," literally means "the ones who cross over," in other words, wetbacks who migrated to Egypt because they were in dire need, and who then crossed back over into Canaan because of their oppression. I’m not prepared to make a political judgment on what we should do in the face of millions of people in poverty living south of our borders, but I am concerned about how we are to follow the Biblical injunction in Leviticus 19, “When aliens live with you in your land, do not mistreat them. The aliens living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love them as yourselves, for you were once aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord.” Faith in Action, by Clare Hanrahan, quoted in Sojomail 4/06

25. Retired United Methodist missionary Ruth Clark is in a quandary. She’s gotten to the place where she has a problem with paying that portion of her income tax she sees as financing a state of permanent war, so the IRS has raided her bank accounts, taking all of the savings she had. Also, every month the IRS seizes 15% of Clark's Social Security income, often leaving her without enough to meet her living expenses. "I intentionally live on the edge of poverty to avoid paying for the war machine," Clark explains, then asks, "Would it be right for me to murder? Would it be OK for me to make children orphans? Do you think it would be OK for me to support a war where children are maimed, where they lose their arms, their legs, their eyes? How can I pay for that?" This has begun to be a problem for a growing number of individuals and families who believe in being subject to those in authority, but at the same time take seriously that, as outlined in the same passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans, that love for fellow human beings means not doing any “harm to a neighbor,” whether next door or in some far country. This is a tension all of us to have to deal with in a government which is supposedly of, by, and for the people, its citizens. Even as we take seriously Jesus’ words to folks living under foreign occupation in the first century, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” we still have to ask, “What does it mean to render to God what is God’s,” if God is truly Lord over everything and everyone?

26. According to an April, 2006, AP report, the creators of Sesame Street have released a new line of videos targeted for children as young as six months of age called Sesame Beginnings, in spite of the fact that the American Pediatric Association still recommends that children under two watch no TV at all, and no children should be allowed the hours and hours of viewing time taken for granted in most homes. The fact is that early exposure to best selling DVD’s for the very young, like “Teletubbies” and the more recent “Baby Einstein” and similar programs may not give kids so much a head start in their education, but may, according to many experts, simply give them a head start in becoming addicted to the screen. At least according to the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, “There is no evidence that screen media is beneficial for babies, and growing evidence it may be harmful. Sesame Beginnings will encourage babies’ devotion to TV characters that have been licensed to promote hundreds of other products.” Bottom line, there seems to be little doubt that young children are programmed by their Creator to learn best through direct social interaction with parents and other caring adults. In other words, media based learning for children will never even come close to being as good as lap-based learning in the warm arms of caring moms, dads and other good adults.

  27. Barrett Seaman is the author of a recent book called Binge, What Your College Student Won’t Tell You; Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection. His book is based on two years he spent observing the lifestyles of college students at twelve universities, including UVA, Duke, Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford, and others. He finds that a distressingly large percentage of today’s young adult students are taking part in regular binge drinking and random sex when they leave home and find themselves in a college culture that is largely free of any kind of moral direction or restraint. Quoting from the book jacket, “sexual relationships are often casual and ambiguous, alcohol and drug use are widespread and dangerously unchecked, (and) anxiety and depression are common.”  Commenting on this disturbing picture in the Spring 2006 EMU alumni magazine Crossroads,, Bonnie Price Lofton writes “today’s students [in secular universities] aren’t making up moral structures, they are living mostly without them, changing their morals from one situation to another, shaped by the dominant peer culture in each setting.” She then cites William Willimon, former dean of the Duke University Chapel, who recently wrote an article for the Christian Century in which he urged universities to again become places “where the young are initiated into the wisdom of the past” rather than abandoning young adults “to their own meager resources because they have nothing of value to say to them.”

28. The March 31-April 2 Spring Home and Garden issue of USA Weekend features an article by Melanie D.G. Kaplan entitled, The New American Dream Home, with the subheading, “Meet the lucky families whose home theaters, kitchens, bathrooms and backyards are the extreme in home customizations.” What follows are descriptions of extreme makeovers like the couple who invested $200,000 to “convert their basement into a sci-fi-themed home entertainment center that puts most local theaters to shame.” Outside their personal theater is a fully stocked candy counter, popcorn popper and hot dog griller. Then there is the lucky couple with the $400,000 kitchen makeover, with two sound-absorbing dishwashers, a walk-in cooler, a breakfast nook with plasma TV, three heating drawers for dishes, and a gas fireplace. Or how about the recently divorced developer who installed a “wet room” in his bath area that has a shower with ten shower heads which, if used simultaneously, dispense 25 gallons a minute. I realize that, compared to the homes of well over 95% of the world, most of our residences would represent the epitome of luxury, but there was something about the excesses in this article that truly made me sick, even though I do want this to remind me that I, too, am embarrassingly rich by comparison, and I too need to hear Jesus’ reminders that all of us who are “rich in things and poor in soul” are in danger of experiencing God’s woes, rather than the blessings promised to those who are content with enough.

29. Sociology professor Christian Smith, in some work he did for Soul Searching, a 2005 book on the religious beliefs of teens in America, concludes that a majority of young people claim to be religious, but aren’t really very interested in any commitment to a community of faith, and are adopting a belief system he calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The new MTD creed goes something like this: 1) There is a God who created and orders the world and watches over human life, 2) God wants people to be good to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions (the moralistic part), 3) The chief goal in life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself (the therapeutic part), 4) God does not need to be particularly involved in people’s lives except when needed to solve a problem (the Deism part), and 5) Good people go to heaven when they die. It could be argued that any religious philosophy or belief system that encourages people to be good to each other is a lot better than one based totally on self-indulgence and pleasure-seeking, but it is also clear that this watered down version of Christianity isn’t really the legacy Jesus meant to leave behind. But the fact is that this generation of young people may have picked up this kind of Pablum not so much from disagreeing us older folks, but by imitating the ways we actually live out our own everyday lives--by professing to serve the God of the Bible, but actually living by a feel-good set of values not unlike Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

30. Singer-songwriter Meredith LeVande made an appearance at James Madison University in March of 2006 with a lecture on “Women, Pop Music and Pornography,” in which she deplored the increase of sexual images in popular music.  LeVande, with a degree in women’s studies at New York’s University of Rochester, used a power point presentation to show how increasingly sexualized images of recording artists are used in music video clips, billboards, MTV, and in magazines to promote their careers, and this has become so common place it doesn’t even raise any eyebrows anymore. The corporate world has a vested interest in this development, she says, in that pornography seems to be among the few things that can be said to be truly “made in the USA”, and media giants like Viacom and News Corp. have major investments in the porn industry, and benefits from anything that makes it more acceptable and more desirable. The result, though, of creating a kind of homogenized view of what a desirable female sex symbol is like represents a demeaning and dumbing down view of women, Le Vande says.  I find it refreshing to hear this from a woman artist who isn’t selling her body, and her soul, in order to make in the music world, and is refusing to let the male-dominated world of corporate-sponsored sex dictate her values and behaviors. For more information about her message and her music, you can go to meredithlevande.com (that’s meredith l e v a n d e)

31. Former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio recently wrote, “Who ever imagined that we would live in an America where the "merciful" would be called soft on crime? Where those who "mourn" would be called whiners, and where the "meek" would be told that arrogance is a virtue? Who ever imagined that the sacred role of "peacemaker" as described by Matthew in the Beatitudes would be recast as a traitor? This inversion of truth and the perversion of our basic values must be challenged, he says. Don Kraybill, in his book The Upside Down Kingdom, stresses the ways following Jesus is meant to revolutionize our ways of thinking and living, in that what is seen as poverty by the majority is seen as wealth in God’s new order, what is seen as popular and sought after in one realm is given little significance in the other. The poor, the powerless, even our enemies become the focus of special love and attention for people living under the new reign of God, the kingdom ruled from heaven. “Kingdom players follow new rules,” writes Kraybill, “They listen to another coach... Kingdom habits don’t mesh smoothly with dominant cultural trends. They may, in fact, look foolish.” If that is true, our task as parents and as followers of Jesus is to create families and communities that are countercultural where, with God’s help, we are promoting a way of life that is, actually, right-side-up.

32. Self-help guru Byron Katie suggests four questions to ask about a painful belief. First, Is it true? Second, Can you absolutely know that it’s true? Third, How do you react (feel) when you think that thought? and Fourth, How would you be without that thought? While I’m always a little cautious about simple formulas, I do like Katie’s focus on truth, which the Bible insists will set us free, making me also wonder whether if something doesn’t set us free (to become more whole persons), if it is really true. As in a piece my singer-songwriter son wrote, I know a girl who thinks that she's no good, it's her best explanation for a messed-up childhood, it's hard to shake a story when it's running in your blood...but just 'cause you believe don't mean it's true, tired preconceptions about those different than you, divide the world up neatly into black and white and blue, but just 'cause you believe don't mean it's true... there's lots of different stories in this world, and some'll squeeze you tighter than an oyster does a pearl, but some'll have you flying high as any flag unfurled, So a good question to ask is, Does what we’re believing about yourselves about others, about God, really stand the truth test? Let’s do the best we can to make sure. (author of I Need Your Love--Is That True?)

33. Luanne Austin, in a column in our local paper entitled, “Respect, Honesty, Love Key to Befriending Kids,” tells of a time she and her mother sat in her high school principal’s office after she had gotten in trouble, and having him talk to her mom as though she, Luanne, wasn’t even there. “Is she doing this for attention?” the principal asks. Mother: “She’s angry at me for divorcing her father. She’s doing this to get back at us.” Luanne is thinking, “Don’t ask me (of course). I’m just a nonentity sitting next to Mom.” Austin went on to describe her Dad’s method of parenting as lecturing, going on and on and on about what she should be doing and thinking, how she is a disappointment to everyone, etc. etc., in spite of the fact that he had been a serious trouble maker when he was her age, something he could never admit or talk about. “It would have helped. The honesty would have helped,” she wrote, “would have been him more human, and more credible than his speaking from a position of superiority” and, to her, hypocrisy. Parents do need to be and to model everything they really want their children to be when they become parents, she goes on to say, to be friendly and fair, but also steady and stable in their drawing good lines that protect them and keep them from harmful and hurtful consequences as much as is reasonably possible. All of which takes really loving them, with a lot of that love spelled r-e-s-p-e-c-t.

34. A February 2006 Washington Post article on how virtual reality, in the form of first person shooter video games prepares soldiers for real war, cites the case of Marine Sergeant Michael Stinetorf, who was with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, nicknamed the “suicide battalion,” which traveled far ahead of the main invasion force entering Iraq in March of 2003. He saw a lot of combat action that gave him a considerably more sobering view of violence than he had experienced in the James Bond and the Grand Theft Auto III shoot-’em-up games he had played a lot as a kid and young adult. Since returning home in September, 2004, he says he “can’t stand watching his friends play those kinds of games, much less play them himself.” Stinetorf, at 23 and a freshman at Grossmont College in San Diego, who hopes to someday study medicine, is quoted as saying. “It just doesn’t appeal to me anymore,... I found the easiest way to release all the violence (I’ve been through) is to walk away from it all, is not to surround myself with it.” So he has decided to avoid shooter games and violent movies and TV shows, and refuses to talk about how many people he killed in Iraq. “That’s one thing I don’t get into,” he says, “even to my closest friends. It’s kind of a way to separate yourself from it.” Reading this got me to praying even harder that parents and people of faith everywhere will decide to just separate themselves from all violence, period.

35. Katherine Greider and Roberta Yared, in the March 2006 AARP Bulletin, report on an Italian psychologist Serenella Salomoni, who had a team of researchers interview couples over 50 to see how having a TV in their bedroom affected the frequency of their lovemaking. Turns out that those who kept television viewing out of their bedrooms reported experiencing sexual intimacy an average of seven times a month, compared to an average of only 1.5 times for those with TV’s next to their beds. The article also quotes sex therapist Aline Zoldbrod, author of the book, Sex Smart: How Your Childhood Shaped Your Sexual Life and What to do about It,” as saying, “Past the falling-in-love stage, sex doesn’t just happen unless you make it happen... You can’t just coast, you have to steer. And if your TV is in your bedroom, then you coast into watching TV.” Whether or not we may consider any of this information relevant to our personal lives, I wonder what affect television and DVD viewing are having on other aspects of our relationships--for example, on how much conversational time we spend with our spouses or children--or other friends and loved ones--in our living rooms, our kitchens, our family rooms. Not everything about our having some screen time may be necessarily bad, but we may at least need to ask, among other things, what is it replacing that may be even better?

2006 - Series 3

1.  The best selling novel, the DeVinci Code, may go down in history as one of the most widely read books ever on a religious theme, in spite of it being primarily a work of fiction. Whether it will contribute to an erosion of people’s orthodox understandings of Christianity faith remains to be seen, but its certainly generated a lot of interest in questions about faith.
Cartoonist Joel Kauffmann has Pontius, one of his characters, express his amazement at 60 million people buying a book “based on the premise that Jesus could hide a marriage from his followers, that thousands would suffer persecution for centuries for a man they believed to be a mere mortal, and that a council made up of unrelated religious sects would then pursue world domination by deifying a simple carpenter who modeled humility, peace, and the self-worth of all.”
The Council he refers to is the Council of Nicea, which came together in the fourth century, not to invent a set of Christian teachings, but to confirm what had already largely become a consensus as to accepted views of who Jesus was and what was to be taught those being instructed in the Christian faith. So while the conclusions of the Council are not to be considered the last word on theology, neither are they the result of some purely arbitrary and self-serving process.
Sometimes the simplest conclusions are the best, that Jesus’ message was then, and still is today, all about serving and loving others, not gaining power through deception or manipulation.

2.  One of the better insights I’ve gained about marriage is seeing that very few of our marital stresses are the result of partners lying awake at night thinking up ways of upsetting each other. Rather, most of our ways of thinking and behaving are by rote, they just happen from habit. And most of our habits, good or bad, we’ve learned from the subculture that is our family of origin.
    Both from experience and through a graduate course on marriage and the family Alma Jean and I took years ago, we’ve found that the better we acquaint ourselves with our past, the better we understand ourselves and each other. For example, from my very frugal farm family I learned to be mildly obsessive about conserving things like food, energy, and of course money--the latter always in short supply at our house. So among my internal rules were “Keep the showers short,” “Turn off all lights when not in use,” “Never throw away anything you might be able to use sometime.”  Alma Jean’s family was also financially stressed, but her school teacher father earned more as she and her younger siblings grew older, and she turned out to be a little less stingy than I.     
With this awareness, we needed to find some middle ground, and to learn to remain calm and sane in the process. We also needed to remind ourselves that our differences in this department were pretty much par for the course, pretty much like those experienced by most ordinary human beings. And that we could, with God’s help, work them out.

3.  A major theme in a book of mine set to be published in April 2007 called Lasting Marriage, The Owner’s Manual, is that all couples need to learn that most basic of rules--to accept and respect each other, differences and all, assuming, of course, that these don’t involve major problems like persistent and unrepented adultery, addiction or abuse. Barring those, when we are too quick to take offense over day to day annoyances, and to accuse our partner of intentionally ignoring or hurting us, we become highly anxious and upset, and begin to make mountains of even the smallest molehills. Since that’s happened all too often in our marriage, we’ve found it helps to keep going back to that basic commitment to simply accept each other, just as we are. That doesn’t mean that many of our deeply ingrained, family-conditioned patterns shouldn’t be fine-tuned or even radically changed. But we’ve learned that if we criticize, withdraw, become defensive, or resort to blame, it just makes things worse, and makes positive change even less likely to happen, even though we may actually engage in some of these negative behaviors because we are desperately trying to fix things, and just haven’t learned appropriate and effective ways of doing it.
It’s when we’re under stress that we most often resort to all of these old coping patterns we’ve learned from our past, not that all of these habits are necessarily bad, but for many of them we need to do the hard work of replacing them with healthier ones.

4.  One of the nicest cards I’ve ever gotten came from my only daughter Joanna for Father’s Day 2006, with a photo picture of a father with his ten-year-old or so curly haired girl that actually looked a lot like our Joanna did at that age, with the following words, “‘Daddy! Daddy!’ I used to say, then when you would scoop me up in your big strong arms and hug me tightly, I felt like the most loved little girl in the world...”
Inside the card my daughter wrote, “I remember, Dad, how special it was to be your little girl---and I’m thinking now how wonderful it is to be your grown-up daughter who loves you so much.” Needless to say, I didn’t feel deserving of all that, but I experienced some tears and a big lump in my throat as I reflected on how good it was to be able to pick up our children and embrace them and tell them how much they meant to their mother and me. Of all of the love languages, affirmation and touch have been among the more powerful ones in our family--along with the other great ones like just talking and listening, offering praise, doing special favors and surprises, all ways we experience a sense of being bonded to each other as family members and creating memories we’ll take with us forever.
I can’t think of a better time than today for all of us to create, and to add to, more and more of the good experiences we can savor as long as we live. Like sending someone a nice card or a note of appreciation, and telling them how much we love them.

5.  A friend of mine shared with me recently how he had experienced lots of anxiety all of his adult life, especially when he was faced with another project in the design and construction related business he was involved in. He carried the major responsibility for the success of the operation, and regularly lost sleep dealing with the fear of not being able to meet the challenges of the next new contract. One day while on an hour’s drive to an especially challenging assignment, one he knew would tax every bit of ingenuity and experience he had, he began to pray desperately, asking God to free him from an anxiety he was once again finding almost immobilizing. The voice he heard in his spirit went something like this, “In all of your decades of doing this work, have you ever really failed to find a way, somehow, to get done what had to be done, with God’s help, the help of other good people, the help of having more time to just keep trying to find a way? What makes you think that this will be the one exception?” And, try as he might, he couldn’t think of anything he could chalk up as a total, unredeemable failure, except for the time as a fourteen-year-old he had once taken a worn-out chain saw apart and was never able to get it back together again. So he decided that from that moment on, he would stop taking on future troubles, and I started banking on all the good assets he had to accomplish whatever he needed to get done next.

6.  Some of the irrational thinking that often goes with committing suicide is that "I can end my life quickly and easily and simply be rid of all my troubles." What people don't realize is how difficult it is, how violent an intervention it takes, to end the life of a reasonably healthy person, whether that violence is in the form of ingesting a poisonous substance (or is lethal because of an overdose of a drug), or whether it is through strangulation, as in hanging oneself, or by a violent blast from a gun at close range. In order for any of these to result in death, an extremely powerful means has to be employed, one our bodies are created to resist in every way possible. The use of a large quantity of pills, for example, often results in a person throwing up repeatedly in an effort to expel the deadly material, so that death often results from someone suffocating in their own vomit after passing out from the overdose. So one of the strongest deterrence to suicide may be to stop romanticizing or minimizing the horror involved in committing this kind of violence, and to rule it out as nothing other than an overt act of homicide, the brutal killing of a human being, and one that results not in the pain ending, but simply being passed on to those who remain behind (which of course may be what the self-destroyer actually has in mind). People in a state of extreme despair desperately need our help and support, in part to help them face the reality of what self-murder is really like, and to focus on alternatives to this kind of “permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

7.  Best-selling author Gail Sheehy, in an article in the June 18 issue of Parade, Washington Post’s weekend magazine, writes, “Married men--regardless of age, race, income, or education--consistently have been found to be healthier than men who are single, divorced or widowed.
In a study of how human touch affects our body’s response to stress, she cites a study by Dr. James Coan of the department of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Virginia, who recruited some married volunteers, put them in MRI machines, and warned them to expect an electric shock on their ankles. When spouses reached in to the machine to touch their partner’s hand, he found that the part of the brain that registers the anticipation of pain turned itself off. The subjects, without exception, reported feeling less distressed. The hand-holding also reduced activity in the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls the release of our stress hormones, the ones that shut down our immune system. And of course, a weakened immune system makes us more likely to get sick. “We can’t see what our spouses are doing to our brains and emotions until a stressful event arises, but its going on all the time,” says Dr. Coan. “When a wife holds or caresses her husband, she is really reaching into the deepest parts of his brain, calming down the neural-threat response.” Somehow in our families, and families of faith, we need to find ways of offering this kind of reassuring, loving and caring touch for each other.

8.  I had someone share with me recently how difficult it was to be separated from his wife, who had moved out and who, for the present time at least, wasn’t open to any overtures on his part to reconcile. At first, he said, he was almost consumed with bitterness and depression, living alone in the house that held so many memories for him of their life together. One day, he said, he looked at his back yard, once well kept and the site of the garden they used to take care of together, but which was now overgrown with weeds and in a state of neglect. Like my life right now, he thought to himself. Then it seemed like there was an inner voice saying to him, “Instead of feeling sorry for yourself and blaming your wife for your misery, why not put time and energy into cleaning up your own back yard and plant a garden there once again,” which he began to do, to cut down the weeds and trim the bushes and till up the garden area. Then he decided that every row of vegetables in his new garden would represent a good quality he wanted to nurture in himself, here a row of kindness, next to it a planting of patience, beside it a row of inner peace, and so on. “I can’t tell you what a difference this made,” he told me, “when I began to focus on what I could do to change me, and in my own back yard, instead of on what I could do to persuade her to change.”
I thought, what a great metaphor of change happening--with God’s help, but also with our doing the tilling and the planting and the weeding we need to do as we wait for miracles only God can bring about.

9.  In Leonard Bernstein’s musical CANDIDE, two lovers share dreams of the wonderful married future they will have together. He is excited about buying a small farm with a garden and some cows and chickens, and she sings out her dreams of owning fine jewelry and doing lots of elaborate entertaining and being world travelers. After each has shared their wishes in great detail, they exuberantly conclude with, “Oh happy pair, Oh happy we! It’s very rare how we agree!”
Indeed, love can be blissfully blind, but marriage must surely be the biggest eye opener of them all. And in no area is this more true than in how we use our money. In spite of what we say, our spending pretty accurately reflects what our real values are. Whenever we spend our earnings (or use our credit card) for something, we are literally showing how much we value that particular product or service. Of course, no two people’s values are exactly the same. And since we will always have a limited amount of money to spend, we realize that whatever our partner spends reduces our ability to get the things we most want. So the compromises we need to make when we decide to become married is never easy. What can make this even more difficult is that many of us consider our spending to be a private matter, something we seldom disclose to even our closest friends. Add to this the fact that we are constantly bombarded with media messages urging us to spend more than we have on things we don’t really need, and its not hard to see how money matters can become number one marital problems if we let them.

10.  Amy Sutherland, in a 2006 New York Times essay, writes about how she successfully applied the techniques of animal trainers to change some annoying traits of her husband, Scott. "The central lesson I learned from animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't," she wrote. "After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging." She began by using "approximations," which means rewarding the small steps toward learning some brand new behavior. "With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop," she wrote. "With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything." She also learned the concept of "incompatible behavior," training an animal in a new behavior that would make the annoying behavior impossible. So to keep Scott from crowding her while she cooked, she set a bowl of chips and salsa across the room.
Changing long standing human behavior might not always be that easy, but its hard to dispute this simple principle of learning, that behaviors that are reinforced with good outcomes--in other words, rewarded--tend to be repeated, whereas behaviors that don’t tend to fall away. And while there may sometimes be some improved behaviors that result from unpleasant consequences, like our nagging or complaining, some sincere, consistent praise usually works far better.  July 5, 2006 Op-Ed Columnist MAUREEN DOWD Washington

11.  The bumper sticker someone gave me recently reads, “God bless the whole world--no exceptions.” Its message counters the ones that specify which of the world’s 200-some nations, and their troops, God is to bless. Surely, God, as Creator and Lord of all, and one who is no respecter of persons, has a view of the world that’s quite different from ours. As humans, we are mostly self-centered. From our perspective as children, everything may seem to revolve around us and everything appears to be about us. Only gradually, and begrudgingly, as we grow up, do we begin to be aware that our world is much larger than we thought, and that its a good thing to share what we have with others in our family and in the larger world family. Most parents understand this, and realize that it will take time before their children willingly share their toys, and are able to team up with others in their play or their work. In a similar way, God understands our ego-centeredness, and so has gone to great lengths to show us a more mature way of loving the world we share with some seven billion other people.
This is what our prayers should really be about, not so much to gain more from God for ourselves, but to experience more of God’s perspective on things, to ask that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In the long term, this is of course better for us and everyone concerned, but it is only from God’s vantage point, as we see others through the lens of Jesus, that we finally gain the ability to bless the whole world, no exceptions.

12.  I recently heard about a man and his wife who were sitting in their living room, with him saying to her: "Just so you know, I never want to live in a vegetative state dependent, on some machine. If that ever happens, just pull the plug." Whereupon his wife immediately got up and unplugged their television set.  The story is intended to be funny, but it’s actually true that our brains can descend into a semi-vegetative state when we’re tuned into the tube. For one thing, television watching takes no skill, requires no training of any kind. Anyone with any level of IQ can do it. As Neil Postman, author of the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death,” writes, “No child or adult becomes better at watching television by doing more of it. What skills are required are so elemental that we have yet to hear of a television viewing disability.” Then there is the fact that most information we get from the tube is intentionally dumbed down--and then hyped up--to attract and to hold the attention of folks at pretty much a preschool level of comprehension and attention span. (The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture, p. 129)
Makes you think that if the “use it or lose it” principle really holds as far as our brain capacity is concerned, that it might be a good thing to limit our passive screen time, and to replace that with activities that require more creative kinds of thinking and reasoning, like reading a good book, doing a crossword puzzle, building something in the shop, or preparing a new dish to share with friends or family.

13.  “Why do I have to do all the giving and he/she none of it?” is a lament I often hear from couples in distress. Differences of perception about this are usually a big factor, in that most people think they do considerable giving, or giving in, and that it’s the other person who doesn’t have a clue about going out of their way to do something nice for us. It’s true there are cases where things get really lopsided in the giving department, but I’d like to suggest we try a different math and a different accounting system when it comes to our giving and receiving. Rather than thinking of a marriage and other relationships as a zero-sum game, in which whatever someone gives results in a loss for the giver, can we see more of our giving as a win-win, something that can result in a big plus for the relationship? So instead of chalking up all of our giving-outs or a giving-ups as being sacrifices, could we think of them as investments, things that can result in a net gain for both of us over the long term, just as when we set aside money in savings or in some stock means that, yes, we don’t get to spend it in the short run, we hope in the long term we will surely reap the benefits. In that way, giving to others can be based on a conscious and free choice and from a position of strength rather than from a poor-me, martyrdom position. The result can be additive and multiplying rather than subtractive and divisive. It’s all in how we do our accounting.

14.  Have you ever really lost it, gotten out of control, gone over the edge, when something upset you so badly you starting throwing things, slamming doors, yelling or screaming stuff you’d normally never let pass through your lips? What’s happening at those times is that the lower brain, the part most like that of members of the non-human, or animal kingdom, has taken over, and our higher brain, the cerebral part, designed for use in thinking and reasoning and problem-solving, is being almost completely bypassed. This lower brain, designed by our Creator as a means of survival when things appear to be life threatening, kicks in with a powerful fight or flight reaction, shoots adrenaline into our system, so we can better fight off a perceived threat or run to escape from it.
In the case of a fire or an accident or similar emergency, this highly reactive equipment is a good thing to have, but for most everyday problems, we really need the more reflective ability in our higher brain to be able to assess the situation and prepare an effective response to it. And when it comes to our relationships, unless there is an actual physical threat to deal with, we need to practice what I call the 45-second rule, setting aside a time in which we simply name the situation or problem we are facing and determine what kinds of calming and problem-solving steps we need to take to address it. In other words, to switch to the appropriate higher part of our brain.
In times like this, less than a half-inch of head space may separate the problem-solving from the crazy-making responses that may follow.

15.  In an article
entitled Why Marriage is Good for Men, in the June 16, 2006 issue of Washington Post’s Parade magazine, writer Gail Sheehy notes that, left to our own devices, we men tend to deny or minimize pain or other symptoms needing medical attention. Meanwhile our wives, and before that, our mothers, serve as our health sentries and urge us to get to the doctor’s office, thus helping to add years to our lives. She also cites a study at the University of California in San Diego, where male coronary bypass patients whose wives visited them early and often in their intensive care units required less medication from pain and recovered more quickly than did men without a spouse. The reverse was true in cases where patients had partners who failed to provide much emotional support, were in a marriage that wasn’t close or strong. There the patients fared worse than average.
Another study she noted, this one done by the Johnson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA, men with cancer, especially cancer of the bladder or prostate, survived longer and with a better quality of life if they had loving and supportive partners.
Reminds me of a humorous saying I once heard, that its clear that men do have better judgment than women, in that we chose them, and they choose us. At any rate, this would be a good day to thank some of the good women and other people in your life who contribute to your health and well-being.

16.  The virtuous woman described in chapter 31 of the Biblical book of Proverbs is sometimes considered an almost amusingly impossible ideal, where this mother, wife and entrepreneur is portrayed in this way: 
                            “She sets about her work vigorously...
                            she opens her arms to the poor,
                            and extends her hands to the needy...
                            She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue.
                            She watches over the affairs of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness.
                            Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he blesses her,
                            ‘Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.’
                            Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
                            Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.”
I realize that poetic description sets the bar pretty high, but when it comes to our striving to become a genuinely good person, a truly good man or woman, why should any of us settle for anything less that the best we can possibly be? If, indeed, a man’s, or a woman’s, reach should exceed her grasp, according to the words of the poet, I see no harm in aiming for the stars when it comes to the good qualities we want to integrate into our everyday lives. That’s different from becoming obsessed with fantasies of perfection, but a vision of a healthy and happy wholeness should motivate us all to become the most virtuous persons possible.

17.  I feel especially blessed by the strengths of good women in my life--my mother, my wife and my daughter being among the finest! Here are some of the qualities of women I most admire:
     A good woman shows a high level of respect for herself, with an equal respect for others, in spite of any negative voices she may have heard in her past.
     A good woman combines toughness with tenderness, a healthy assertiveness with a gracious spirit and a warm heart.
     A good woman is straightforward in expressing her needs and feelings. She doesn't expect others to be able to read her mind, but is able to speak her own mind in clear and assertive ways.
     A good woman celebrates, and takes good care of, the beautiful body God gave her. She neither publicly flaunts it nor tries to imitate media and market-driven images of young, airbrushed models and celebrities. Her beauty radiates from deep inside, reflecting God's image and presence in her life.
     A good woman is faithful to the core--to God, to her family and to her church family--and  is also joyful and faithful in the use of her varied gifts.
     A good woman is capable of being a dedicated mom. She sets a strong example as a parent who is devoted to her children and committed to helping them grow to become good women and men of God.

18.  Dorothy C. Bass, in her book, Receiving the Day, writes of a mother she knows who has come up with a different way of asking her children, “How was your day?” As she tucks each child to bed at night, she asks them, "Where did you meet God today?" And they tell her, one by one: A teacher helped me; there was a homeless person in the park; I saw a tree with lots of flowers on it. Then she tells them where she met God that day, too. So before the children drop off to sleep, the experiences of the day have become the focus of their bedtime prayers.
I’m thinking, What a great way to remind us to be more aware of how the extraordinary can become a part of our everyday, as well as to experience a special connection with God as a part of the day’s closure.
And then to bless each family member with something like this prayer attributed to Cardinal John Henry Newman, in the book, Prayer in All Things:
                                                            MAY [GOD] SUPPORT US all the day long,
                                                            till the shadows lengthen
                                                            and the evening comes
                                                            and the busy world is hushed
                                                            and the fever of life is over
                                                            and our work is done-
                                                            then in his mercy-
                                                            may he give us a safe lodging
                                                            and a holy rest and peace at the last.  

19.  Dr. Sean McCabe and colleagues at the University of Michigan and Harvard university studied the results of numerous surveys of thousands of randomly selected students from over 100 colleges across the United States, and found that college lifestyles
associated with being members of college fraternities and sororities tended to be most hazardous to students’ health . Those students were also more likely to have experienced higher levels of substance abuse in high school, and when in college, the largest increases in cigarette smoking, binge drinking, and drug abuse. The researchers’ conclusions are that most of these young adults, already more involved in using alcohol and other drugs to excess before they enrolled in college, created a climate that fostered more of that kind of behavior in sororities and fraternities known for lots of wall to wall partying. Dr. McGabe’s conclusion, “It’s important for each student to explore, perhaps with counseling, a possible mismatch between his or her college environment and his or her individual needs. Some students will benefit from settings that emphasize socialization outside the party scene; these might include group living arrangements based on shared academic or extracurricular activities.”
Sometimes its good to hear that its not just us religious folks who are concerned about promoting some moral prudence and more healthy living among our young adults.  Psych Messenger April 2006

20.  I’ve come up with a plan for worriers like myself that works like this. When I’ve got some things that really cause me anxiety and even sleeplessness, I need to set aside, say, an hour a day to do nothing but worry about it, to worry hard, intensely, to worry myself sick if necessary, but all in the space of the hour set aside for that purpose, the worry hour. At other times I need to tell myself, when I want to ruminate over something, that this isn’t the time to do this, but that I will take the time later (during my worry time) to give this all the attention I can, maybe to write down my fears in a “Worry Book,” raw, unedited stuff that can ruin the appetite and rob you of any peace you might have had. But then, when the time is up, to file it away for the next day.
I say all of this with a  bit of tongue in cheek, but if we can learn to tell ourselves to start worrying, maybe we can also learn to tell ourselves to stop it. And when we do really express our worries in a kind of free-for-all, even exaggerated way, maybe we can see how useless this behavior really is. Sure, we need to do what we can to make things better, but what we can’t control we may as well let God take care of, which is a part of what God is for, to take care of things we can’t, and to help us through whatever else does happen. So, on second thought, maybe our worry hour should become a prayer and meditation hour instead. Worry is, after all, a form of negative meditation.

21.  An August 2006 Associated Press article reports on an issue of Pediatrics magazine with a longitudinal study by the Rand Corporation that was begun in 2001 and which shows that teens who listened to lots of music with degrading sexual messages were nearly twice as likely to start having intercourse or engage in other sexual activities within the following two years as were teens who did not listen to such music. Specifically, the study found that a steady diet of the kind of “songs depicting men as ‘sex-driven studs’ and women as sex objects, and with explicit references to sex acts” were more likely to have that effect than those where sexual references were less frequent, or more veiled, and where relationships appeared to be more committed. Researcher and lead author of the study Steven Martino said the music teaches boys to be relentless in pursuit of women and that girls learn to view themselves as sex objects, and that overall, the music “lowers kids’ inhibitions and makes them less thoughtful” about their sexual decisions.
The article also quotes Natasha Ramsey, editor of a teen sexual health Web site, as saying, “A lot of teens think that’s the way they’re supposed to be, they think that’s the cool thing to do. Because it’s so common, it’s accepted.” “Teens will try to deny it,” 17-year-old Ramsey adds, “but it IS the music. That has to be one of the biggest impacts on our lives.”  We parents, grandparents and other mentors of teens need to do whatever we can to make sure that becomes less true for adolescents and young adults we care deeply about.

22.  According to an August 18, 2006, Associated Press article, one in five Vietnam veterans suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome at some time during their first twelve years following that war. Currently the Department of Veterans Affairs spends almost $10 billion a year on benefits and on general mental health care for vets. Symptoms of PTSD include flashbacks, emotional numbness, hypervigilence and exaggerated startle responses that leave a person impaired following one or more traumatic events, made all the more difficult because of the nature of a war like that in Vietnam when it was very hard to tell civilians from enemy soldiers and where there were no safe places, no safe lines, to get behind. The number of Vietnam era veterans receiving compensation for post traumatic stress is now around 216,000, according to this report, and growing seven times as fast as the number receiving benefits for disabilities in general, and that figure doesn't include more recent veterans who have sought mental health services since returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. I can’t help but keep wondering when people of faith and of civilized common sense from all over the globe will ever learn that war is simply not an acceptable way of going about resolving problems, and that we all need to stop accepting it as some kind of necessary evil. The cost in loss of life and health is just way too high not to look for better ways of working things out.

23.  Every now and then it could do us good to rate ourselves on, say, a scale of 0-5 on each of the Biblical ”fruit of the Spirit” vital to good relationships. Then to work at a plan for growing more of each of these qualities: LOVE--to be gracious and caring toward others in spite of their actions,
JOY--to demonstrate a positive spirit even in trying circumstances, PEACE--to experience a sense of inner well-being in spite of life stresses, PATIENCE--to have the calm and strength to endure things, not give up, even in trying times, KINDNESS--to consistently show respect and care toward others, GOODNESS--to act positively toward others, for their good, even when tired or when tempted to behave otherwise, FAITHFULNESS--to have an unwavering commitment to others’ good and to the strengthening of stable relationships, GENTLENESS--to operate from a reservoir of inner strength that results in avoiding aggressive or desperate reactions, and finally, SELF-CONTROL--to be able to live a non-anxious, inner controlled and reasonably well-managed life most of the time.                                    
Practicing these time-honored qualities, taken from a text in the New Testament letter to the Galatians [5:22-23], is an almost guaranteed way of making our marriages and other relationships way more satisfying and enduring.

24.  My wife, child number six in the late Michael and Alma Lauver Wert family, is part of an e-mail group called wert-link, one of the newer ways members of their family, including us in-laws, stay in touch with each other’s day to day lives. I’ve always valued the way this family connects, with their frequent e-mails, family pictures sent though the internet, and with regular phone calls and informal visits, along with the occasional reunion with several generations of descendants getting together for lots good food and conversation. Some of these Wert-Lauver offspring are even learning to be less concerned than their recent ancestors were about having their homes and tables prepared just so when folks stop by unexpectedly, a trend I’m glad to see. One of the grand nieces, a young mother of two active preschoolers, recently offered this invitation to a family member traveling to her community. “You are welcome to just stop in any time you are in the area, Uncle Jesse!  Our lunch specials are cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, or sometimes peanut butter and jelly. If you let me know on ahead of time, I might even get some cleaning done.”
I like that kind of down home hospitality, the kind that makes maintaining good relationships more important than just creating good impressions. After all, we are family.

25.  In my later years I’m finding that getting an uninterrupted night of sleep isn’t to be taken for granted the way I once did. So one of the things I’ve done to make better use of any unplanned for wakefulness is to use that time to and pray over the list of folks in our little house church congregation, from A to Z, beginning with Atwell, a single woman in our church, and ending with the Zhou family from China. Ironically, I often find myself experiencing some zzz’s before I get to Z, so I sometimes start at the end of the alphabet and pray toward A. In any case, getting my attention away from my own worries and on to some thoughts about God and God’s people seems to make a difference in the rest department, a rest based on trust. Tilden Edwards, author of Living Simply Through the Day, writes, “Voluntary sleep requires a confidence that life [and our loved ones] are cared for when our ego is asleep at the wheel. The more we believe that life is safe and real only when we're awake and guarding and acting, the harder it is for us to let go into sleep.”
From the book,  Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Reading from the Northumbria Community, I take this piece:
                    I AM PLACING my soul and my body in Thy safe keeping this night, O God,
                    in Thy safe keeping, O Jesus Christ,
                    in Thy safe keeping, O Spirit of perfect truth.
                    The Three who would defend my cause by keeping me [and my loved ones] this night from harm.


26.  According to a recent posting on the MediaWise.org website, risks for children on the Internet keep getting worse. And a recent Canadian study finds that fewer than half of parents enforce any rules about instant messaging or chat sites, resulting in unmonitored use of the Internet and placing teens and children at risk for Internet predators. MySpace.com has come under increasing scrutiny and has become the object of a lawsuit accusing them of not working enough to protect users from predators, with Attorneys General in many states are calling for more protection, and with Congressional hearings being set to focus on how to make the Internet safer for kids.
Above everything else, parents should make sure they know what their sons and daughters are posting on the Internet, who they are chatting with, and especially what personal information they are giving out that can make them victims of unscrupulous cybercreeps. The National Institute on Media and the Family, with their website, MediaWise.org, offers some good tools to help with their Internet Safety Series and MediaWise Parental Control Guide.
Meanwhile, its enough to make this grandparent wish for simpler times when the biggest worries we had about our children’s safety had to do with providing adequate supervision at the neighborhood park on when going downtown shopping. Today our kids are being exposed to a whole new underworld from which they need some good protection.


27.  Writer Jim Magruder, in Marriage Partnership magazine, describes Four Ways to Rekindle Intimacy with your spouse:
1) Don't just tell your mate you love her. Tell her why you love her. Adding "because" at the end of "I love you" increases intimacy in your marriage, as in, "I love you because you're so unselfish," or, “I love you because you take time to listen to my problems.”
2) Reintroduce the element of surprise. Identify patterns and break routines. Become unpredictable. Celebrate anything and everything. Buy, or make, the unexpected present. Take an unplanned trip.
3) Strive to out-please the other. Out-pleasing each other means putting your spouse's happiness first, especially in the mundane moments of life. So when he has washed the dishes, respond by keeping the kids out of his hair while he's doing a favorite activity. Keep looking for ways of going the second mile to make life more pleasant.
4) Don't keep score. Marriage breaks down when you constantly compare your sacrifices to your mate's. Concentrate on doing your own generous giving from a position of strength and abundance rather than operating from a sense of emotional scarcity, carefully watching every penny in the give-and-take of your relationship.

28.  According to an article in the August, 2006, issue of Pediatrics magazine, a research team at Wake Forest's Baptist Medical Center found that teens who regularly watched pro wrestling on TV were more likely to behave violently than other kids, and that girls seemed to be even more influenced than boys.  Dr. Robert DuRant, head of the team, said girls who watched wrestling six or more times over the two-week period had a 170% higher chance of starting a date fight than those who didn't watch wrestling. For boys, there was a 77% higher rate. The researchers also found that those students who were most likely to fight on dates, especially after they had been drinking or using drugs, were also the ones who watched wrestling most often.
None of this may seem particularly relevant to many of you, whose children or grandchildren may not be at all interested in the so-called sport of “pro wrestling,” but it struck me as just one more example of the obvious, that our media do influence our behaviors
. Kimberly Thompson, a professor at Harvard University's School of Public Health, is quoted in the article as saying,  "It's yet more evidence that, when it comes to kids and media, learning happens. Parents have to pay attention to what's in their kids' media diet."

29.  “Keeping up with the Jones’s” is clearly a problem for kids as well as for us adults. Caryn Rivadeneira, in an advice column in an online magazine called MOMSense, notes how our young are increasingly focused on having or wearing all the stuff their cool friends are in to. She writes about how a parent might respond to a 12-year-old who has become obsessed with buying the clothes and other things she feels she just has to have for school. One idea she promotes is to first take our children "shopping" in their own closets, have them try on things from last year and put whatever doesn't fit in giveaway piles. Then with whatever clothes that do still fit, to help them think of ways of mixing and matching outfits to make the "old" like new. Then when doing their shopping, she says, to look for new accessories to dress up last year's clothes, in addition to getting whatever new clothes that might actually be needed. She also recommends setting up a clothes budget and then letting children determine what they buy, but within those budgeted constraints, or to use money from their own savings if they want higher priced items than we feel we can afford.
In today’s media and market driven culture, we’ve got to be really creative and proactive if we want to avoid having our kids blindly join the shallow and superficial consumer world of many of their peers.

30.  Nothing should surprise me any more, I guess, but I still can’t get used to seeing one of our local building supply stores begin displaying its artificial Christmas trees in August. Yes, August. Christmas has become such an important make or break part of our economy--one that’s actually become dependent on holiday over consumption in order to make its annual profit--that no effort is spared to entice us to spend earlier than ever, more than ever, and way more than is good for us and our children. An organization called Alternatives, based in Sioux City, Iowa, puts out an annual piece called “Whose Birthday Is It Anyway?” suggesting ways of celebrating Christmas that are more congruent with how Jesus would want his birth and life to be remembered. I’m pleased that the Family Life Resource Center initiated a cooperative Alternative Giving Fair for our community, first set for December 6, 2006, from
9-3, and inviting any interested nonprofit groups from the area to set up tables with information on how to give to some cause in honor of a loved one, who then receives a nice card from the organization stating that someone has contributed something in their name. Ralph Steger, our part-time administrator, who headed up this initiative, told me that his family has for a number of years done all of their giving to each other this way, except for kids under 18, who still get some traditional kinds of purchased gifts. And the First Presbyterian Church on Harrisonburg’s Court Square, which agreed to host the first event, has already been doing something like this for members of their own congregation. To me, alternative giving sounds like a great idea that should catch on everywhere.


31.  Some of the best neighbors we ever had were John and Maude Lantz, a farm couple who were members of the church where I served as pastor for twenty years. The ribbon of road between our houses, ours the parsonage by the Zion Church, and theirs the two story frame house with eight children just a half mile across the little valley that separated us, was symbolic of the God-blessed tie that connected us together over these many years in many ways, in sharing garden things, having the Lantzs as occasional baby sitters, and enjoying the hospitality of meals, conversations, Dutch Blitz and dominoes. Maude and John were saints in aprons and overalls, always willing to lend a hand or a listening ear, always able to make our family feel at home in their house. When Maude passed away September 22, 2006, I had the honor of helping conduct the graveside service at the church cemetery, within sight of our two houses, where she was laid to rest at age 88 next to her beloved husband who had died six years earlier. It was a bittersweet occasion, with family and close friends, children and grandchildren celebrating the  good and gracious life of this truly memorable woman.
This was the very time Alma Jean and I were in the process of selecting gravesides in that cemetery for our own burial. We
ve chosen two plots that were available right next to those of members of the Lantz family. It feels good to know that in death as in life--and in the afterlife--we will still be neighbors.

32.  Susan Conner, whose research on the effects of television ads in shaping the food preferences of  preschool age children appeared in the October, 2006, issue of Pediatrics magazine, is chagrined by how effective marketers have become in targeting the very young. This was impressed on her when she first heard her two-year-old spontaneously humming a jingle from a McDonald commercial
he
d heard repeatedly on the Disney Channels The Wiggles. Cute, she thought, but wait a minute, is this a good thing? In her subsequent study, she found that ads for high-fat, high-sugar foods made up a whopping 82% of the sponsor messages even on PBS programming for preschool children and 36% of those on the Disney Channel.
Previous studies have shown that children as young as three who see TV ads are more likely to request and eat foods high in fat, sodium and sugar. Harvard Medical School professor Susan Linn, cofounder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, states,
Its very concerning that at a time when childhood obesity is a major public health problem, that preschool programs are still being sponsored by fast food restaurants promoting food thats not healthy for children. 
At present such marketing is unregulated, but the FCC has announced it plans to study links between the ads and the rise of childhood obesity.

33.  According to an article by John W. Kennedy in the May 2006 issue of Christianity Today, American consumers, while earning record incomes, are also accumulating record debt. And there is little difference, he says, between what believers and nonbelievers earn, spend, save, charge, or even donate to charities. According to Cardweb.com Americans owed nearly $696.7 billion to credit card companies in 2004, over twice as much as a decade earlier. The Federal Reserve, according to the same article, reported that consumers overspent their incomes to the tune of--for the first time since the Great Depression--a negative savings rate, minus .5 percent. One financial advisor who claims to operate on Biblical principles of financial management, and who pretty much thinks credit cards are of the devil, is quoted as saying,
Weve been sold debt as a product by the most sophisticated marketing teams in the world, and theyre called banks.
Not all people of faith take the same position, but even if only a small percentage of people in this country is having serious debt problems,  we should be concerned that the numbers seem to be growing, along with increased incidences of folks having to go into bankruptcy. The simple principle our culture has failed to teach us, one  that my parents drilled into us by word and example, is that
if you cant afford it, do without, or find something else to make do until you can.

34.  We all responded with horror at the violence perpetrated against innocent Amish school children in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in early October 2006. The killer, Charles Roberts IV, age 32, who committed suicide after the attack,
had apparently chosen his targets not because he had anything against the Amish, but because he knew the one-room Nickle Mine School in which he shot ten young girls execution style would have no locked doors or security officers to prevent him from carrying out his dreadful deed. What I found moving was that even as members of these quiet, rural faith communities mourned their loss and buried their children in their white homemade dresses and simple wooden caskets, they were also able to turn the other cheek, inquiring as to how they could help the wife and family of the perpetrator as well as supporting the grieving families of the victims. Daniel Esh, a 57-year old Amish artist and woodworker whose three grandnephews were at the school during the attack, comforted the Roberts family and expressed his forgiveness, saying, I hope they stay around here and theyll have lots of friends and a lot of support.
Gertrude Huntington, a researcher of Amish society,  in an Associated Press article, is quoted as saying,
They know their children are innocent... and know they will join them in death...their hurt is very great, but they dont balance the hurt with hate. In the kind of eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth world in which we live today, I find that a powerful witness to Jesuss way of responding to violence.

35.  David and Claudia Arp, founders of Marriage alive and co-authors of more than thirty books on strengthening marriages and families, offer practical, and sometimes humorous, suggestions on how to brighten up a tired marriage with some fun dates together.
We try to maintain a dating attitude, says Claudia. We take the things we have to do and do them together. For instance, every fall we have a flu shot date. Dates don’t have to be elaborate or expensive, they say. For example, they once spent some time in a card shop selecting cards for the other to read, then returning them to the rack. They also do grocery shopping together, where David once picked up a dozen yellow roses in the produce department and gave them to Claudia. When they were finished shopping, Claudia put them back, to David’s surprise, saying she got sufficient enjoyment just from carrying them around in the store.
Besides dating, the Arps suggest giving lots of gifts of encouragement, hugs, “I love-you's,” helping each other with household chores, and speaking kind words. “It takes five positive statements to offset one negative one, "says Claudia, who adds, “We need to remember how Jesus washed the disciples’ feet, and to apply that Biblical principle and put the other person’s happiness first.”
Married for more than forty years, the Arps say they have learned to accept each other as a package deal. “The good comes with the bad” they say, “We’ve redefined irritating habits as incredibly unique and lovable idiosyncrasies.”