God Logic Meets Tirade -- The Width of Love

America has, from the beginning, striven to be a place of tolerance, a wide, welcoming place open to all, but lately that ideal has shriveled into something that looks far more like evil than it does like love.

You see, tolerance, openness, freedom itself, can only thrive on a diet of love – the kind of love that demands nothing from the loved, the kind of love that propelled Christ through the awful day of his crucifixion:

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never fails.           (I Corinthians 13:4-8a)

Love suffers long and is kind – where is that quality in our breast-beating about “oppression” and our union “rights?” Where is our kindness to those who must suffer in order for us to have our way? We see long-suffering in our soldiers, but where else? We seem to have compassion only for far-distant, illusory groups that we feel deserve our pity (the illegal immigrants, the poor, the middle class, the blacks, the Tibetans, non-Muslim women), not for those actual fellow humans in our midst. Do we really want to give up our personal charities in favor of governmental ones?

Love does not envy – yet almost half of us reportedly want to redistribute wealth http://www.gallup.com/poll/147881/americans-divided-taxing-rich-redistribute-wealth.aspx. We indulge in hate toward the corporations http://www.cafepress.com/+anti-corporation+bumper-stickers that provide us with unimaginable prosperity, and that hate we claim as moral superiority http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politics/most-hated-companies.htm.

Love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely – Occupy Anarchy – did you hear that? There is no love in what you are doing, no love for your fellow Americans – look what you are doing to their neighborhoods; no love for the poor – you accomplish nothing for them; no love for your country—you acknowledge wanting to destroy it, with no thought to the untold suffering that would create. You don’t even demonstrate any love for yourselves, living as you are in filth, dulling your brains with dope http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2011/11/08/10_quotes_that_tell_you_how_bad_the_occupy_wall_street_movement_has_gotten/page/2.

Love does not seek its own – yet watch the election politics – there’s as much smearing of feces in this presidential race as there is in Zucotti Park. Love is not provoked, yet listen to the nastiness. Love thinks no evil, yet note how quick we are to assume the worst http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2011-11-08/herman-cain-accusers/51129758/1. We have, instead of love of country, rejoicing in iniquity. We have, instead of rejoicing in truth, the dissemination of some of the worst lies possible.

Love bears, yet believes; endures, yet hopes. Love never fails. True – love doesn’t fail, not the pure, God-driven love that sees each person as God’s individual creation, someone to be valued and recognized, being in some way the very image of God.

Oh – right – America doesn’t “do” God anymore, our president has made that clear, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation”   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIVd7YT0oWA. Well, hmm, that could be a problem. You see, that love we’ve been discussing, if we could live that way, would solve nine-tenths of our domestic problems, sans government expenditures and interference. But here’s the catch – humans, apart from the grace of God, can’t pull that off.  We are, on our own, only capable of loving narrowly – we love those who appeal to us, who please us. We love those to whom we are related, and that we don’t do well. We don’t, on our own, love widely. Only God – who epitomized wide love when He went to the cross for us – can help us love like He does and only that love will heal our national sins.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.   (I Corinthians 13:1-3)

Even if our government manages, by some miracle, to adopt perfect policies in all areas, no good can come of that unless each of us rethinks our place in this world. There aren’t enough laws, regulations, or taxes, in all of history or the future, to cure human society of what ails it, for what ails it is our refusal to learn to love as widely as God loves. No substitutes exist.

Miss Kansas

I’ve written a piece of fiction this time, a small story about the importance of fathers and the resilience of children.  It’s set in a dress shop on the afternoon of prom – won’t you come with me and see what happens?

Miss Kansas

We’re watching a girl choose a prom dress. She must do so alone and her father must not know she’s even been asked. Her mother might have helped had she still been alive, but she might not have, knowing Jane’s date is not on the approved list – no country club membership. And it’s late – her friends are all having their hair done, laughing together at Magnolia’s.

Jane lifts out a small, black dress, holding it at arm’s length and then up against her body. She looks down on it and sighs. Too plain-Jane, her father would say if he were with her. She pulls down a red one, strapless and mermaid-shaped, “Cheap,” he’d say -- she can hear the derision in his voice. Glancing up and down the picked-over rack, she sees turquoise tulle, lime green satin, plaid taffeta – nothing quite right. The mannequin behind her is wearing white chiffon, long and voluminous, ruffles like butterfly wings around the shoulders – very beauty- pageant. Her father would like that. She wonders if the gown comes with a purple satin sash embroidered in gold -- Miss Kansas. She wonders if he’d grumble about the $500 or if he’d just be proud that she picked out something expensive. With him, she never knew.

Jane wants more than anything to please her father, even though he cannot be pleased. Her father expects beauty – Miss America beauty --- perfect bone structure, straight teeth, huge eyes, a confident bust line.  Jane can be pretty, and she is thin and tall, but if the wind blows her fine hair away from her high forehead, or fatigue lies heavy on her lids, the prettiness fades and so does the light in her father’s eyes.

Jane pulls down a cream satin strapless and, holding it to her waist, performs a graceful pirouette. Her father wants talent, the kind he has – musical. Her painting will never be Michelangeloid, so it isn’t important; her dance, in spite of years of lessons and pairs and pairs of pointe shoes, will not take her to the New York Ballet; it’s just a frothy girl thing. She flunked piano when she was six, and a song never comes out of her mouth in good condition – he winces when he hears her sing.  Her writing he doesn’t even know about, and if he did, he’d say that you can’t make money writing poetry. Not even her grades please him, even though they are mostly A’s – it’s the mostly part he hates.

She sees her father as handsome, brilliant, witty. He too can dance, on a ballroom floor, and she had loved watching him and her mother waltz across the living room. She’d loved it when he taught her how, his arm across the middle of her back, his feet weightlessly propelled by the swoop-tap-tap of the music. She and the dress waltzed a few steps together.

She is vaguely aware that her father is tired.  She knows that he rarely sleeps and that when he does it’s martini-induced.  He dreams of being rich – he had enough poverty as a child, enough want, enough humiliation.  He wants his daughter to have wealth; he wants her to marry well; he wants her to excel at anything profitable; he wants her to go to the best schools, though on his salary that will require scholarships. He daydreams about how he’ll brag about her – maybe she’ll win a beauty pageant, maybe she’ll get into Radcliff, maybe she’ll marry someone important. He pictures her in a little black dress, sipping a martini at a sophisticated cocktail party.

She hates it that he rarely looks straight at the fact that he’s merely an accountant for a small chemical firm in a medium-sized town in Kansas, or that he knows nothing of beauty contests. 

And she knows that he rarely looks at her. She is more imagined than real.  He has no idea what longings play across her soul.  He is disgusted that she seems to have no desire to please him; she seems preoccupied, distant, uninspired.  She is to him an extension of himself and should want what he wants.  Instead, she has stubbornly refused to love math or pursue music or make herself beautiful.  She is a disappointment just as was her mother.

Jane is walking out of the store, disappointed, when she notices a sale rack in the corner. Her father never lets her buy things on sale – that’s for poor people, he says.  She rummages through the leftovers: purple satin with pink embroidery, yellow silk with a wide red belt, split-pea green cut down to show navel-length cleavage. Nothing.

Then, at the end of the 4’s, hiding in the forest of rejects, hangs the dress. She pulls it to her and heads for the dressing room.  In the mirror it looks even better --navy blue silk, Egyptian-looking gold and blue beading around the boat-neck and the hem -- a hem that ends high on her thigh.

She stands there remembering the look on James’s face when he called out to her in the hall yesterday. “Hey, Legs,” he’d said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “How ‘bout goin’ to prom with me.”  He had grinned that tilted grin of his. His eyes had looked both apologetic and scared, and then they traveled down her body to her ankles.

She laughs at her reflection remembering the way his eyebrows asked the question again as his eyes finally met hers. “He wants legs,” she thinks, “I’ll give him legs.” She spins around on tiptoe to get the full effect.

She passes the Miss Kansas dress on her way out. She stops and runs her hand down the soft chiffon. We can see her imagining herself carrying roses, the sash across her shoulder, her father applauding wildly.  Then the corners of her mouth dip down as she realizes that he’d only say, “You didn’t stand straight enough.”

We watch her hug the blue dress to her as she walks toward Magnolia’s to get her long legs waxed.

Doorknobs and Broomsticks

How many doorknobs have you turned in your lifetime? Surely someone has stats on that – they know how many hours we’ve spent standing in line at Fourbucks for our caffeine fix and how many years of our lives we’ve spent in bathrooms. Surely they have a rough idea about doorknobs.  Of course, it would be hard to count the metaphorical doors, and we’ve all opened a bunch of those.

Last night I watched a DVD of two renowned men discussing their figurative doorways in a debate at Biola University in the spring of 2009. They met in front of a packed house and TV cameras, which were piping the discussion to filled rooms all over campus, in fact, all over the world. The men – William Lane Craig (Professor of Philosophy at Biola) and Christopher Hitchens (writer and public speaker, famous for his atheistic views) were debating the existence of God.

Now, there are two doors we’ve all stood in front of, rattling the knobs and wondering what was on the other side. Craig, of course, had the advantage because he had looked through the peephole of his door and could describe with scientific, historical, and personal accuracy what he saw there; Hitchens’ door, which opens onto nothing and therefore has no peephole, gave him little with which to counter Craig’s assertions. Mr. Hitchens could only add to the conversation the reasons why he didn’t want to believe in God; he had no way of proving that God didn’t exist, which is an entirely different discussion. The Great I Am is perfectly able to be, whether we want Him to be or not.

Hitchens said, at one point, that he didn’t want anyone, let alone God, telling him what to do, as if his disbelief disarmed God in some important way, and as if the guidance of God was a limiting and repugnant concept. For a person who was once acclaimed as the 5^th most important intellectual in the world, this is a pretty sophomoric view, though I’ll have to admit that we Christians are the ones that gave him that idea.

We forget about grace with a frequency that must make the good Lord roll His eyes and shake His head. Christianity is not about following the rules; it’s about how impossible it is for us to do so, but Hitchens didn’t know that. Christianity is not about hog-tying us into a life of prim, pursed-lip propriety; it’s about being so grateful for what Christ did for us that we live out our lives in quiet wonder, keenly aware of the glory that awaits us – and that even blesses us here in Satan’s world. Christianity opens thousands of doors for us, allowing us to (with a nod here to Kurt Vonnegut) “ become what we can become,” what God designed us to be.

Isn’t that what every human being wants? to be thoroughly and completely and successfully ourselves? And aren’t most of our problems caused by our own inability to do so? If there is a God (and evidently there’s little evidence to the contrary), and if He designed us, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that following His instruction manual would result in better outcomes? God isn’t trying to cramp our style; He’s trying to help us make the most of our individuality -- if He’d wanted cookie-cutter people, He would have made us all exactly alike.

Poor Mr. Hitchens, he, like millions of others, was so distracted by all the bizarre, gargoyle carvings on the Churchianity door that he didn’t even notice the modest, simple door labeled Christ. Jesus warned the disciples that the church would start as a small mustard seed and grow into a monstrous tree filled with birds (who, in Scripture, often represent evil). I’ve heard way too many people talk about the apparent – and often real – hypocrisy, the ignorance – not only of science and history, but of the Bible itself -- and the incoherence of our world view to blame this attitude on Christopher Hitchens. That is as much our fault as it is his.

In his book Jesus Among Other Gods Ravi Zacharias quoted Augustine (I think) as saying, “Never judge a creed by its abuse.” I wish someone had taught Hitchens that, for our abuse of the Word of God does a pretty good job of obfuscating who and what God is.  What have we done, representing our Lord so poorly that this unfortunate man is lauded and praised for his disgust with all things Christian? Mr. Hitchens will someday open his door and will have to face the terror that is there, and we are partially responsible for that. Thank the Lord that He died for that sin, too. Meanwhile he, and all those millions like him, will ride their broomsticks all over the world, proclaiming loudly the ugliness of the God who tried to save them.

Down the National Rabbit Hole

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.     G.K. Chesterton

As I follow the great upheavals that shake this country, I can’t help but remember this line, penned, over a hundred years ago, by the famous British Christian writer, G. K. Chesterton. I’d like to take him on a tour of one of the Occupy Wall Street sites. I’m afraid the experience would shock him speechless, though he’d have to enjoy seeing how right he was.

I’ve spent decades watching this transformation of American values. I remember well that clear and understandable time when we knew what was wrong and we knew that all of us agreed on that moral code. We weren’t yet sophisticated enough to have our own sets of designer rules, tailor-made for the comfort of our own troubled consciences. We just had to meet the general standards, or suffer the consequences. Pregnancy out of wedlock was frowned upon. The wildest among us used to drive 75 miles south to Marysville, Kansas, to drink watered-down beer, but no one I knew smoked pot – we would have been horrified. We knew that private property was just that – private, and though we may have drooled over someone else’s car, or house, or prom dress, we didn’t assume we the right to take it. We weren’t saints – but we weren’t confused.

Today, however, confusion has become a feather in one’s intellectual cap. I watch the Occupy folk and, whereas I agree with them that, “something is rotten in Denmark, “ the moral ground on which the protesters stand is a very warped thing.

For one thing, neither our personal freedoms nor our nation can withstand the loss of the right to private property. No society can – witness the current non-existence of the Third Reich and the USSR. Nor can we withstand the loss of a sense of personal responsibility; someone has to be the grownup. And no society can long survive the destruction of the family. 

As a long-time public school teacher I watched that one first-hand. I’ll never forget one class period when the students were all so out of sorts I couldn’t get any of my lesson plan going, so I stopped and asked them what was up. Each student had a story to tell – dads walking out, parents kicking kids out, whole families being evicted, parents addicted, siblings going to jail – horror story after horror story.  And these kids were not only supposed to come to my class and learn, they were expected to grow up and hold this country together.

It is that generation who is out there now camped in our city centers. They know nothing about economics, about world or American history. They have no religious training. They only have the sketchiest idea of what family is. They don’t seem to know that anything other than emoting is required of them.

Yet they have learned a new morality and they’re pretty hysterical about it. They’re sure it is no longer necessary to be sexually selective and loyal, or even private, – but you better not drive a big car, or vote Republican. It is just fine to destroy your brain cells with the current chemical available on the black market, but don’t get caught actually producing anything useful – that reprehensible behavior uses natural resources and makes non-producing people feel bad. We must be very careful about which words we use, unless we’re talking about Christians or conservatives. It’s just fine to destroy or deface the private property of others, after all, the end justifies the means, but don’t you dare express allegiance to this country’s founding freedom principles.

Freedom now means a lack of consequences for anti-social behavior. No stigmas allowed. We praise single moms, homosexuals, and promiscuity of all flavors. We accept academic cheating as just the way things get done; I once had a father explain away his daughter’s plagiarism this way: “She has to get good grades to get into a really good school.”  Another father said, “I don’t know how you can give this paper an F; it was an A when we bought it.”

Hate is now good – if aimed at the right people (pun heartily intended; thirty percent of the kids Occupying say they think it’s just fine to use violence to get their way. Stealing is good if the victim is rich enough – though there’s a lack of clarity about what rich is. Lying is fine if it gets you what you want. We openly covet; charity is nothing more than voting in taxes for other people to pay. Killing is good if the victim hasn’t been born yet.

But express an allegiance to the economic system that made us prosperous and you are out of line. Declare an interest in any of our founding documents, or heaven forbid (pun intended) the Bible, now that’s a stigma-worthy moral lapse. Refuse to call perversions normal and you can be fired, shunned or spat-upon.

We have not improved our society in the last 40 years; we have exchanged our birthright for a mess of pottage, and if you’re not as old as I am, you probably don’t know that reference. We have not only loosened the moral rigor that protected our most important institutions, we have ginned up an advanced case of self-righteousness over false ideas. The planet isn’t dying, people here aren’t being “oppressed,” the corporations aren’t trying to kill anyone. Yet our moral behavior puts the “solution” to those “problems” at the head of the line.

If Chesterton thought that morality was getting twisted in the early 20^th century, today’s morass would make his head spin. I sometimes suspect that we’ve all fallen down the rabbit hole; I haven’t spotted any Mad Hatter costumes at these rallies, but I keep expecting to; the stoned caterpillar with the hookah has certainly been present. Nevertheless, I still believe the pen is mightier than the sit-in, so I just keep writing.

Occupy Everywhere

A dear friend recently asked if I thought the “Occupy Everywhere” crowds connected in my mind with Biblical prophecies about the end times.  Good question. These days practically everything seems to yank my mind in that direction; evil seems to be crawling out from under every rock.

Whoa – am I assuming that the “Occupy” movement is evil? Well, let’s see: using drugs, drinking, and having sex in the streets, using cop cars as toilets, making constant noise, having no coherent message, blocking traffic and commerce – that is chaos. Chaos is evil. Ergo, in a perfect logically syllogism, the “Occupy” movement is evil. Since the American Nazi Party and the Communist Party USA have both endorsed the movement – I stand vindicated.

Is this evil connected to the end-of-the-world scenario? Could be. Of course, upheaval weaves through history leaving slubbed wads of nastiness in every decade. Of course, fraud and corruption have walked the halls of government before – remember Tamanny Hall from your high school history class? Of course, power-hungry people have been trying rule the world since Babel.

We do have to remember that this old globe is no stranger to evil. I think of that scene in Job where Satan turns up in the throne room of God, and God asks him where he’s come from.  Satan, no doubt leaning insolently against a pillar and picking his teeth, replies, “From roaming about on the earth and walking around on it” (Job 1:7). Feels to me like he’s still out and about, doing what he does best.

However, in this age of invention (beyond anything our grandparents ever hoped for or dreaded) we are finally seeing -- not the fulfillment of prophecy -- but the unfurling of the technologies that will make those events possible. Revelation must have been a total mind boggler to earlier generations, but now it’s not at all hard to understand a world-wide economic system which uses a “mark” to identify those who are allowed to participate. It’s not at all hard to picture Christ returning to earth and everyone on the planet seeing Him land on the Mount of Olives.

It’s also not difficult to picture the Anti-Christ taking the reins of a one-world government, and doing so, much to the relief of chaos-torn nations.  Many of the “Occupy” crowd carries placards demanding global government. (They don’t seem able to imagine what the world would look like today if Hitler had come to power under such a system.) Speaking of Hitler, some of the protesters carry anti-Jewish signs. Hmmm… that rings some prophetic bells too, but before I can discuss that issue, I need to prevent some confusions.

You see, the Doctrine of the Immanency of the Rapture teaches that no prophecy need be fulfilled before the Rapture’s occurrence; we don’t want to make the mistake of reading what we’re seeing on the national and global scene as fulfillment of prophecy.  We can, however, see it as the setting of the stage, not only for the Rapture, but for the two major events that will precede the Tribulation.

According to the scholarship of Bill Salus in his new book Isralistine, Psalm 83 presents us with a picture of Israel, after a successful blitz attack on those hostile countries on her borders, becoming wealthy beyond belief.  Picture Israel in control of part of Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, Syria, Jordan, -- well, you get the picture. Oil, oil, oil. It’s not out of the question for Israel, now that the U.S. is not likely to be of much assistance, to pre-empt the hatred that is brewing against her. It’s not out of the question that God would bless that effort. Salus places the timing of this event after the Rapture but before the Tribulation.

Arnold Fructenbaum (In the Footseps of the Messiah) also thinks that the famous Gog and Magog attack on Israel (Ezekial 37-39) will happen because of her vast wealth – and note that the nations involved there are not her current next door neighbors, but distant nations – Russia, Iran, Turkey – as if the buffer nations now occupying the land in between aren’t even there. He places the timing for this event also after the Rapture and prior to the Tribulation.

Today, a fairly casual observation puts Israel on the edge of doing something rash, and probably necessary. And it’s not hard to imagine Russia, Iran and Turkey aiming for her, whether she’s oil-wealthy, or not. Conditions and events that seemed far-fetched just twenty years ago seem totally plausible today.

To go back to my friend’s question:  the world feels to me as if it’s a caterpillar turning to pre-butterfly soup.  The Middle East muddle, the world’s financial stew, the trans-national demonstrations of confused and mostly unbelieving people – any Bible student could list a dozen more symptoms.

I have no idea what a caterpillar feels like mid-metamorphosis, but it doesn’t look pleasant to me, any more than the world’s immediate future looks pleasant. I’ve never been a fan of living through history, which is often painful and messy. I like history tucked away safely in books. That being said, our Lord promised to come for us. He also promised Israel her land, and His kingship. Those things will happen – everything else He’s promised, He’s delivered. So, all things considered, there’s a mess ahead, but I think those of us who belong to Him also have a really exciting flight to look forward to. I hope to see you all then.

1Thessalonians 4:13 But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. 14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.[a]

15 For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. 16 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.

John 14:3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.

John 5:34 “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.”

A "Death" in the Family

OK – I missed a week, but I had a reason; I lost my hard drive. (I know, not a child, not a leg, not a house – just a hard drive) This shouldn’t be a major event, but I am numb with mourning.  Yes, I had backed everything up, but as Murphy so succinctly says, “If anything can go wrong, it will.” 

My drive started clicking – which they aren’t supposed to do.  Then it seized up, the mail program caught in mid-flight from the loading dock.  After my MacBook came back from the hospital, I was amazed at its recovery.  I reinstalled program after program.  I tried out new ones.  I celebrated the fact that all the flotsam and jetsam of a 5-year-old hard drive had scrubbed itself sterile.  Clean slate, new start, all that jazz.  I felt a little shaky, but I had my back-ups to hold onto and I was ready to go. 

Finally, the time arrived to put it all together again.  I got the external hard drive out of the safe and hooked it up. Its little orange icon obediently appeared on my screen and I took a deep breath.  It was going to be no easy task to import, sort and reorganize 5 years worth of a teacher/Bible student/writer’s documents. The drive held two-thirds of a novel I’ve been working on, several hundred poems, essays, short stories, Power Point presentations, entire units of study.  It held curricula for two college classes, letters, eulogies, and hundreds of Bible study lessons, all my e-mail contacts – well, I could go on and on, but the job that lay before me was a doozey.  It was also an opportunity to weed out piles of useless material; I’d put off doing that because the piles loomed over me like a range of mountains.  Now was the time to haul out the pickaxe and get to work. 

I double-clicked on the icon.  A new window appeared on cue.  I began scrolling down through the listed files; they rolled past my searching eyes -- .jpg, .jpg, .jpg, .jpg – and on and on and on.  Hundreds and hundreds of photographs.  Now and then a file that contained sound effects – where did those come from? – but no document files, no music files.  I felt my stomach scrunch up.  Surely there’s just something I don’t know about doing this. 

That’s a good theory – I’ve learned most of what I know about the cyber-world by guess and by golly; I’m too old to have been born knowing code.  My sweet, forgiving Mac gave me lots of elbow room, students pitched in to help me figure things out, my husband and my super, computer-savvy son untangled my messes.  Little by little I learned.  I knew to use the “search” slot on the finder window.  No results.  I tried different configurations. Nada. I made sure all my software was ready and usable. Nothing changed – just photos.

Finally, with my heart in my throat, I called in reinforcements.  My husband and his best friend came to my rescue, only they couldn’t slay the dragon, either.  I called my son – he suggested taking the old drive to a data-retrieval expert – more on that later.  I called the repair folk and they left one of those we-know-you’re-an-idiot messages – “Plug in the drive, click on the icon….” 

So far, four days later, no one’s been able to find anything but photos on that drive.  Tom found a few important things on his computer, but most of my last five years is gone.  I just got an estimate from a company that can for between $400 and $1000 recover some of my files.  Maybe.  They’ll only charge me if they can restore some of it, so it’s not a crap-shoot, but here’s the kicker – if they find something, then I have to decide what’s it’s worth to me to get it back.  Worth, in the $ sense of the word.  What’s the monetary value of an unfinished novel to an aging woman living off ever-dwindling mutual funds?  Per poem, what is each piece worth – in dollars and cents?  Gees.  I have never thought of my writing that way – which maybe is a flaw I need to correct.  I can bet that paying someone $1000 to retrieve my book may be adequate motivation to finish it. 

Hmm. But here’s another rub. Things happen for a reason – God does not play games with His people and He is all knowing, all-caring, and great enough to actually have a plan for a nobody like me.  If five years of writing is gone, what’s the point?  How am I to read this?

• Am I to remember Job?  “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:22) Am I to assume that one way or another what I’ve had will be replaced and better than it was before?   That seems possible.  He can feed me ideas.  He always has. Perhaps this perverse external drive will eventually cough up the goods. 
• Or – am I writing the wrong things? Spending too much time at it? Putting too much emphasis on it?  I think of Matthew 6:21, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  Hmmm… 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ll keep writing until I can figure it out.  Maybe there’s another horse to ride whose hooves I haven’t heard yet.  But I know now what writing means to me. I know that in some way creating that body of thought expanded my heart, pulled me out into the world, and stretched my existence.   When I sat staring at that unhelpful screen full of .jpg files, it all snapped back into an emptiness I hadn’t felt for many years.  

------ But I can’t mourn for long – I have a lot of new writing to do. 

 

Tirade IV

 In American symbolism the wings of the eagle represent the two competing views of government: the right wing (hence the term right-wing) represents a laissez-faire, minimalist approach to government; the left wing a more controlling, more government-heavy view. (Skousen). For 200 years we’ve been able to find a balance between the two, but lately our eagle is getting yanked so hard to the left, the only thing that can be done to hold her upright is to pull extra hard the other way.

The Wings of the Eagle

A nation divided against itself cannot stand.  Abraham Lincoln

We’re frozen, you know.  We have chosen up sides, crossed to our respective corners, grabbed our rackets and stomped off to our own side of the net.  We can’t even start the contest because we’re not playing the same game; the  rules we are willing to play by are diametrically opposed.

·      The left “wing” thinks truth is that which is repeated often enough to stick in a fuzzy mind; the right expects facts and truth to be equivalent.

·      The right loves logic; the left loves emotion.

·      The left believes that their ends justify their means; the right believes that a good thing done in a wrong way is wrong.

·      The left sees man as perfect, and society as flawed; the right recognizes our human propensity for sin – both individual and collective.

To listen to our national dialogue today you’d hardly believe that the two wings are attached to the same bird, that we even live in the same country. 

·      The left comes from a place where having is key; the right lives where accomplishment rides point. 

·      The left is sure that nothing is sure; the right, that the most important things are absolute.

·      The left still lives where who’s rich and who’s poor is determined by the state; the right recalls the revolution that left all that behind in Europe. In America, who’s rich and who’s poor is determined by the grit, determination, and inventiveness of each individual.

·      The left sees a god of their own making, undemanding, uncertain, and malleable; the right sees the God that Is. 

·      In America/Left few show interest in either the immediate details or the long term generalities; America/Right likes to look human nature straight in the face and deal with the details; it likes to look to the big picture – the what-will-happen-if? the where-will-the-money-come-from?

·      Where the left wing lives “facts” are flexible, useful only when they support the left, Where the right resides, facts are facts and should be reported that way.

·      In Leftville economic ideals are grounded in envy.  The ideals of the right are grounded in the hope that we can all be prosperous.

Both sides claim patriotism, but the left loves a Constitution-less, equality-driven mega-state, where freedom means life without responsibility.

The right loves the America originally conceived by the founding fathers, an America where laws are few and simple, where our personal flaws are something we struggle to overcome, and where freedom is the result of responsibility.  The last 200 years have demonstrated that the latter formula allows for the greatest prosperity and successful pursuit of happiness the world has ever known.  The last 100 years have shown decisively that the left’s approach is, and always will be, a dismal, violent failure. 

I don’t think there are any longer any binding ligaments between those extremes.  Twenty years ago I could easily play along with the “agree to disagree” paradox, but I can’t anymore; the consequences for entertaining the wrong ideas are too dire and too immenent.

My prayer for this country is that God will help us heal our thinking – that He will open both sides to His truth, that the light will once again shine upon this nation.  What I have to remember is that healing is often as painful as the truth, and as expensive as a lifetime.   Let us all pray.

Skousen, Cleon.  The Five-Thousand Year Leap.  The National Center for Constitutional

            Studies. 2009.

Widgetopia

A Parable of Envy

Once a man named Rich had an idea for a gadget he thought would be useful. He was sure it was an idea God had given him since it popped into his head while he was praying.  He pictured a widget that would be made of nuts and bolts and feathers and toenail clippings and red beads.  It would help people organize their junk drawers.  Rich built a prototype, got his patent and his permits, mortgaged his house, purchased his raw materials and started his business.

He was right.  People loved the Widget – before long every household in the country had one.  He sold them in five different colors and several sizes.  He developed new versions – Widget 2.0 created great excitement and everyone rushed out to replace their old ones. Widget 2.5 included a phone and an automatic grocery-list generator. They sold like hotcakes.  The junk drawers of the country became cleaner and cleaner.  No one lost his keys anymore.  People always knew where their scissors were.  And Rich got rich.

Rich spent money.  He bought a huge house and breathtaking cars; he sent his kids to fancy schools, joined the country club, and took up golf.  His wife hired a gardener, a chef, a housekeeper.  She bought beautiful clothes and handmade furniture.

It wasn’t just Rich who got rich; many people were better off now that Widget Inc. was doing so well.  Rich had hired several thousand people to run his factories.  The companies that made nuts and bolts and red beads also had to hire more people to meet the demand.  The farms that raised the birds that dropped the feathers invested in more research and developed several new breeds that produced more feathers on less feed and laid great purple eggs that became quite popular in their own right.  A whole new industry was built around retrieving toenail clippings and the pedicure business had to kick into high gear – suddenly everyone could afford pedicures.

The people who worked for Rich spent the money he paid them. They bought houses and dresses, cars and furniture, food and baseball mitts. All the people who worked at producing those things also had jobs and were paid money which they spent on houses and dresses, cars and furniture, -- and on Widgets. 

Rich was really amazed at his success and felt he should give back to the community and to God who had given him the idea – as if providing jobs for half the town was not enough.  He set up scholarships, funded research grants, and built hospitals.  The people who worked for him and for the other companies also set up charities to help those who were sick and injured, handicapped or unable to work.

But, as is usually the case, some folks weren’t happy – some because Rich was richer than they were.  Some because they didn’t want to work as hard as Rich wanted them to.  Some were afraid of the power Rich’s money gave him. Some were unhappy because they were afraid of joy.  Many of these people felt that their unhappiness was somehow Rich’s fault. After all, he had more than everyone and that didn’t seem fair.  These folks thought they’d be happier if he had less and they had more.

They groused and complained and wrote books about how evil Rich was.  They held rallies, shouted slogans, and dissatisfaction, like the flu, spread.  Eventually they passed a law that took more than half of everything Rich made.  They passed another law that taxed a third of what Widget Inc. made.  Then they set up an agency to oversee the treatment of the birds on the Widget farms and to control the red dye used in the beads. 

Rich had been planning to expand his factories, but much of the money went to the government.  It went into programs like Faircare (to “even up the playing field,” though no one knew what that meant), or like Restgrants (to provide vacation funds for everyone, largely at the expense of the employer, though one didn’t have to work to qualify).  Rich also had to spend a small fortune complying with the latest purple eggs regulations, finding a new source for his red beads, and picking up the tabs for all of his employees’ resort charges. 

Rich cancelled his plans for the new plant, which meant that the design for Widget 3.0 would have wait.  He moved his bird farms to Mexico where he didn’t have to bother with the egg regulations.  Of course, he raised the price of the Widget, but China was now manufacturing a cheap knock-off, so that didn’t help much.  Eventually he had to lay off 20% of his workers and shut down one plant.  The people who once worked for Rich, and the people who once worked for Rich’s suppliers, no longer bought Widgets and no longer gave much to charity. 

They also didn’t pay much in taxes. Neither did Rich because his income was way down. Widget Inc. didn’t have much profit to tax either. So the government had to borrow money from the Chinese, who made the Widget knock offs, in order to pay for all the programs. Then they sought to raise taxes again to pay the interest on those loans and to pay unemployment to all the workers Rich had to lay off. 

But then Rich had another idea – he’d been praying a lot and he wasn’t stupid.  It occurred to Rich that he could make Widgets elsewhere.  He knew he wouldn’t be able to sell his factories – everyone else was in the same pickle, but he mortgaged his house, bought a small country off the coast of Finland, and talked many of his employees into coming with him. There he started all over again and eventually began producing Widget 3.0.

Back home, Widgetopia became an empty ghost town.  The factories stood vacant and waited while all the windows broke. Rich’s beautiful house was turned into a mental hospital.  The bird farms were used as housing for the homeless, and there were many homeless.  The charity organizations all dissolved and Rich’s hospital was taken over by the government. 

In the end, Rich was still rich, and the unhappy were still miserable, even though their numbers had increased by the thousands.

But somewhere in a damp basement a woman named Hope is fiddling around with an idea, one that showed up in a dream, one that involves violets, chocolate, and screen doors and soon she’ll begin production.  Perhaps she’ll be allowed hire someone.  Need a job?

Jumping off Cliffs -- God Logic IV

This is shocking, and in our post-modern world I shouldn’t admit it, but I like to think.  I know, I know – if I were truly cool and trendy I’d acknowledge, in grand existentialist form, that everything is just matter, therefore nothing matters, so I should just emote away about whatever matter is currently in vogue.  But I can’t. 

I am human and I was made in God’s image and God thinks, therefore I think. 

Q. Why isn’t thought more popular, then?  (I can hear you thinking.)

A. We’ve been taught to start in the wrong place, so we get lost and give up.

Q. Where is the wrong place?

A.  Read on…..

Picture two cliffs separated by a great chasm.  The cliffs are made of sedimentary rock, layer upon layer, each a slightly different shade.  On one side the stone deposits have built up on bedrock, solid and immovable – absolute truth.  On the opposite bank the levels are less regular and, well, level.  The foundation on which they rest their considerable weight is cracked and volcanic, full of air bubbles, nearly weightless – relative truth.  

If you stand with me on the solid side, you’ll understand what I’m about to say; if not, I invite you to argue with me; I like refining my ideas.

Let’s look at the bedrock.  It consists of God – the God who existed before He spoke time and space into existence, before Earth, before before.  This is Jehovah – “I am that I am,”  (Exodus 3:14). Where God is there is absolute existence, and therefore absolute truth. 

What about the opposing pumice foundation, the one that says nothing is absolutely true?

Well, we all intuitively know that one of the most important rules of logic says that no statement can be self-refuting.  “I am not me,” makes no sense.  “My Dachshund is not a dog,” fairs no better.  How does “There is no absolute truth” strike you?   Yes, I know, It has an absolutist ring to it, but most of today’s intellectuals will swear by that assertion, even while their base crumbles beneath them.  In this scenario God becomes nothing more than a human construct embedded in the string of time we call history; godness is whatever we want it to be.  We aren’t made in God’s image, but He in ours.

If, though, we start with the stability of side one, we can figure out that the God of Truth would want us, His creatures, to know truth – and sure enough, there’s the Word of God; we can barely imagine a being so true to Himself that His Word and His existence are one and the same  -- “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God,” (John 1:1).  Not only did He reveal Himself in His Word, but also in His creation; what we know as modern science began as a search for more information about God. 

The opposite side of the chasm boasts purely human wisdom and post-modern science, which staggers about on its own quagmire of Darwinian assumptions, assumptions that are being rapidly demolished by science that is more interested in truth than in invention.  Follow me – if there is no absolute truth and God is just another fabrication, then science alone can explain our existence – though, if nothing is true, I can’t imagine why we would bother. 

Under it all we want to know who we are, why we are, so we keep looking. “What is the nature of Man? “ my favorite teacher always used to ask.  If we take God’s Word as absolute truth, then the “nature of man” is not a rosy picture,  “ All have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” (Romans 3:23).  If, on the other side of the chasm, we’re just making things up as we go (which is reasonable if nothing is rock bottom – pardon the pun – true).  It feels just fine to state, with absolute surety, that man is basically good.

Add a little evolutionary twist to that and we learn that man is getting even better, the barbarism of the last century notwithstanding. 

This attitude puts the relativist in a pickle though.  How is he going to explain evil if man is basically good?  The scapegoats (sorry about using a Biblical term) obediently line up – society, chemistry, family, corporations, poverty, bullying – and all get the cart before the horse.  How can the crookedness of a building be the reason why the bricks it’s built of are crooked?  Huh?   The relativist spends a lot of energy trying to restructure society, the economy, the drug laws, etc. all in an effort to rescue perfect man from his evil oppressors.  Somehow the fact that the oppressors are people eludes him.

The relativist has another option, though, if the transference thing gets shaky: he can change what “sin” means.  If we’re doomed to do evil, and nothing is carved in stone, then let’s just change the meaning of evil.  Easy.  Pedophilia is really just fine because kids really want it.  I had a class of honors students tell me right after 9/11 that it wasn’t wrong that the high-jackers flew those planes into the Twin Towers.  They were doing what they thought was right. 

Evil, on the other cliff, is a very clear and solid idea.  Anything non-God, anti-God is evil – a once-perfect angel, a “well-meaning” politician, a self-centered parent.  God is absolute perfection (and I am not talking about Allah), so anything short of that perfection ….. Yikes. I’m very glad God has a solution for this, because I don’t. “For God so loved the world that He gave is only begotten son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life,” (John 3:16).

Our national dialogue is getting nastier and nastier because, at the very bottom of the cliffs we stand on, our assumptions are diametrically opposed.  On one side morality is clear, immutable, and imposed by God – on the other it’s improvisational, constantly changing,  and driven by whatever the latest catch phrase is – tolerance, diversity, equality  -- the ends always justifying the means.  Nothing is evil, just sick.

The solid cliff recognizes free will and our own responsibility; it acknowledges that only the grace of God can fix anything because we humans are too screwed up.  The relativist side assumes that we are all victims, doomed to be poor, or addicted, or gay, or whatever, and that stopping our pain will involve transferring that pain to someone else.  “Tax the rich” folks shout, without any idea how impoverishing someone else can enrich them.

We can’t straighten out this tangle of ideologies without acknowledging our basic differences.   Let’s choose our cliffs with our eyes wide open and let’s be ready to defend our positions from our foundations without feeling the need to malign or threaten, browbeat or demean. 

Where do you come from?  On what do you stand?  Which cliff do you claim? 

Tirade III

Make-Believe Villains and the Pursuit of Happiness

I’m on another toot, so hold on -- our national bandwidth is so clogged with faux-thinking that I’m gasping for a good, clear, lung-cleansing breath. Let’s open a window and see if we can get some air in here.

Let’s shake out the ugly myth of Corporate Greed, our national, make-believe villain, which is assumed to be worse somehow than the greed of those trading carbon credits in Chicago, raking in trillions from the global warming scam.  Corporate greed is also evidently morally inferior to the personal greed of those slurping unnecessarily at the public trough like the women in Detroit who had waited in line to get some of what they called, “Obama’s stash.”

Let’s take a deep breath of reality and stop pointing propagandized fingers. Let’s look at some economic facts:

• Corporations are not moral entities – they are legal entities. Like families, they are made up of individuals who may or may not be moral.  If my fourth cousin, twice removed, embezzles money from the head shop where he works on alternate Thursdays (when he’s not too stoned) it’s not my fault.  It would be wrong to stigmatize my whole family for his idiocy, and it is equally wrong to throw a blanket of blame over an entire industry because a few people weren’t adequately diligent in their duties, or because they were trying to work with new technology.

• Corporations are groups of people who invest, design, build, package, distribute and market most of what we eat, wear, drive, sit on, live in, and enjoy.  Corporations make life not only possible, but pleasurable.  I nearly choke on the hypocrisy of those who drive around in their Volvos, wearing their Abercrombie jeans, sipping a Starbucks while they text away on their I-phones about corporate greed.                                                  Give me some air.

• Corporations are only dangerous when they get in bed with government.  Look at the eminent domain mess in New London, Connecticut. Business conglomerates don’t have power over our lives; government does.  A business cannot arrest you, try you, imprison you, confiscate your property, or execute you.  Government can. A huge corporation is a powerful entity, but it’s buying public has ahold of the reins; if a business can’t sell its product, it’s dead.  If, however, it successfully sidles up to government, then we’re all in trouble. Look at the tax money that’s been swallowed up by GM and all they have to show for it is an electric car no one wants to buy. (GM has sold only a few thousand Volts despite tens of billions in government support.

• Corporations exist to make a product the public wants, and to make a profit doing so.  The profit made by a corporation goes to its shareholders – ordinary people who have invested in that company hoping to come out ahead -- to add to their Social Security, to send a kid to college, or start a new business.  An old high school friend – a staunch and verbal liberal – was bemoaning the other day his difficulty in finding companies in which he could invest, companies that suited his higher-than-normal moral standards.  He seemed to be trying to find companies that used no natural resources (i.e. green), created nothing that would last (i.e. green), and, in the end, made no evil, capitalistic profit.               I swear, I can’t breathe. 

• Corporations don’t pay taxes even though they are taxed – at the highest rate in the world – 35%, but knowing that their shareholders will not readily give up 35% of their dividends (only to be re-taxed on whatever income they have left), corporations do several things:
• They look for and utilize loopholes, and tax law is so convoluted that it’s filled with them. 
• They move their operations to a less tax-heavy location.
• They pass the tax on to their customers. 

      If they are going to go on producing what their consumers want to buy, which requires the capital their shareholders provide, they have no choice.     There now, doesn’t that feel better?  Breathe.

• Corporations, in the current mythos (I love using liberal words), are the antithesis of Benevolent Government.  But government, like the corporation, is built of individuals – who often have no knowledge of or respect for business and who may or may not be moral.  One can be as greedy for power as for money – aren’t they just two sides of the same coin?  Why would we assume that the official put in charge of overseeing the corporation would be morally superior to those under his power?  After all, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely – thank you, Lord Acton.

• Corporations – of all sizes – and the people who run them, work for them, and invest in them are the only human thing that stands between us and complete financial ruin.  Those who hamper corporations, hamper us; those who attack them, attack us; those who attempt to destroy them are, whether they know it or not,  attempting to destroy the only country that ever gave a rip about the pursuit of personal happiness.             There. I feel better.  How about you?