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?

Coincidental Phones

Irony is not a literary device. Irony really happens and often in a way that makes you think God is trying to tell you something.  After all, coincidence can only go so far in explaining things. In fact, coincidence explains nothing; it just gives the inexplicable a name and lets us off the intellectual hook.  Some ironies, however, just won’t pack away that nicely, like the incident with the phones.

We once bought a cute little Cape Cod house in the southwest corner of Lincoln, Nebraska.  It sat, nestled amongst four sliver poplars, in one of those motley older neighborhoods that had happened gradually and naturally, without the aid of a developer.  Houses of all prices and styles of architecture had settled in cheerfully, side by side, connected by lilac-lined alleys which filled with fireflies and children on sultry summer evenings.  The house to the north of ours was the oldest on the block, dating back to the turn of last century.  It was a square little hip-roofed, four-room bungalow, one of those tiny white clapboard places with a kitchen and bathroom lean-to tacked on to the back like a mere afterthought.

A couple of years after we bought our house, the old man who lived in the bungalow packed up and left, renting the place to a young couple.  Bob and Andrea moved in with two Australian shepherds, several un-caged parakeets (which they allowed to swoop incontinently through the tiny rooms), and a little girl who didn’t seem to belong to either of them.

In the Midwest when a new neighbor moves in you bake cookies or make a tuna casserole, walk over, introduce yourself and offer gardening advice or any random assistance -- “If you need anything...” 

Bob and Andrea needed to use our phone.  In those days it could take a couple of weeks to get your phone hooked up, so that wasn’t an unusual request -- not until a couple of months had gone by, and Andrea was still popping over several times a day to bang on the half-glass back door and point demandingly at the phone -- even when I was standing there using it myself.

Often her phone calls were of a frantic nature.  She’d grab our phone book, rip it open to the yellow pages and with one finger resting on one number at a time, she’d work her way down through the list of local bars until she found Bob. Usually, in these instances, she was visibly shaking and once I heard her say, “Well, he was supposed to bring me something, but he hasn’t shown up yet.”  It wasn’t hard to figure out the something wasn’t a quart of milk.

Needless to say the situation both annoyed and unnerved me. I am naturally a social wimp -- I had just started teaching and hadn’t yet perfected my confrontational do-it-my-way-or-else tone of voice, so I was at a loss.  I knew how to be Nebraska nice, and that was about it. 

Other goings-on next door concerned us.  At our house we buy a new stereo about once every ten years.  At Bob and Andrea’s stereos came and went on an approximately bi-weekly basis.  Out with the old in with the new.

Then there was the case of the missing Indian.  He stood well over six feet tall had long, pony-tailed hair, and drove a dark turquoise Baracuda.  He came one evening and then vanished.  The Baracuda stayed, but we never saw Tall Chief again.  We watched their backyard for burial mounds, but no evidence ever appeared.

Tom and I don’t usually monitor our neighbors’ activities so closely; they usually aren’t that interesting. It was Lincoln, Nebraska; we weren’t used to such inner city behavior and we were fond of our stereo.  Besides which, the phone thing was getting to be more and more weird. 

I had been rehearsing my get-your-own-phone speech and was almost ready for the showdown when we woke one morning to find all their furniture in a pile on the front lawn.  They were gone.  Must not have had money for the rent either.  Eventually their furniture vanished too and little by the little so did the bad taste the whole thing had left in my mouth.

A year later we too left the neighborhood. We headed west. We hosted the requisite, pre-move garage sale, packed everything we’d need until the movers arrived into our panel truck and hit the highway.  After a sleepless night in Wyoming (Did you know it is possible for all the motel rooms in an entire state to be full at the same time?), and an endless trek across eastern Oregon (during which the kids sang mind-numbing repetitions of “Sweet Betsy From Pike” and we got buzzed by an F14 Phantom on a training run -- but that’s another story) we arrived in the Rogue Valley. 

Now to find a house to buy.  We checked into a motel right off the freeway, sent the kids out to the swimming pool and started reading the want ads.  But alas, the phones in the motel weren’t working, so off I went to find one, my pocket full of dimes (You could make a phone call for a dime in those days.) and the newspaper rolled up in my hand.  The pay phone sat in the parking lot of a nearby gas station and, in spite of the August heat, I stepped in and slid the door closed.  I stacked my dimes on the shelf, opened up the paper and began making my calls. 

About half way through my list I realized that someone was pacing around the pavement waiting to use the phone.  I know how to be nice, so I scraped the dimes off the shelf, rolled up my newspaper, and squeaked open the bi-fold door.

Busy tucking away the dimes, I didn’t look at the next tenant until I had stepped out of the phone booth. There, standing in the gas station driveway, Australian shepherd at her side, stood Andrea, 1600 miles from home and a whole year later, still waiting to use my phone.

Whatever Bob had been bringing her in the year since I’d seen her last had killed a few brain cells, because she had no idea who I was and so the irony of the situation was completely lost on her. 

It wasn’t lost on me, though; I’m still trying to figure out what God was trying to tell me.

The Only New Thing

Last week one of my readers made this request: “I’d like you to go one step further and explain why He ‘allows’ bad things (AKA, evil) to happen although He is indeed all powerful, all knowing, all loving.”    I thought I’d answer here:

One of my favorite poets, Wendell Berry, closed his poem “The Creation” with this line, “The only new thing could be pain.” * Everything God had made was perfect  -- a word we toss off too easily.  

The two human souls He made were good, and they only had one option for being bad – eating the fruit of the tree.  They felt no need to fight, to hurt, to steal.  Their motivation and behavior was perfect.

The two human bodies He built functioned exactly as He designed them – Adam and Eve didn’t suffer from indigestion or the common cold.  Their knees didn’t bother them; they never had to deal with a bad back or an arthritis flair-up.  And for all we know they could have been lounging about Eden for a thousand years.  Even that kind of age was no problem; they were strong and smart and beautiful.  Perfect.

In fact Eve was so perfectly beautiful that Adam chose death with her over life without her – Robert Frost wrote of this most tragic love story in his sonnet Never Again Would Bird's Song Be the Same. http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost/719

The result of the choice they each made – Berry’s “new thing” – was pain --- pain in childbirth, pain in work, pain whose ultimate conclusion is death.  In fact, the whole earth was affected by the choice made by Adam and Eve because it had been their domain and when they abdicated, they turned it over to Satan to run (Heb. 2:5).  

So, you ask, why did God allow that?  He’s sovereign, after all, and omnipotent, and loving.  What was He thinking?

God chose in His sovereignty (His free will) to create a new set of creatures who would also have free will.   This divine decision is related to His previous determination to create the angels (Psalm 148, Job 38).  They too have free will.  We know that a third of them revolted (Rev. 12), that they pay attention to us (Luke 15), that we are in some way a resolution to their problem. 

So, the question of evil has its source in the angels – the fallen angels – who think that a creature can exist without its creator, that a creature can even overshadow its creator (Isaiah 14).  All evil comes from that idea.  Satan, once the best angel God ever created, and now the ruler of this world, is operating on that assumption – “Look ma, no hands!” In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s not doing very well. 

When Eve bought that lie, “…you will be like God,” (Genesis 3) when Adam, who knew that it was a lie, chose it anyway, evil took over. Whether this took place at the instant of their decision, supernaturally, or happened somehow physically with the ingestion of the fruit, we don’t know, but we do know that they became so tainted that their offspring would inherit their misery.  

Now the question is, “If God, being omniscient, knew A and E would screw it up, why create them in the first place?”  He did so to meet a commitment to the angels before us and to His own perfection.  And He, being just and good and loving, had prepared a solution to the evil that human free will selected.  The Trinity had already agreed that the Second Person, Jesus Christ, who is called “The Last Adam,” (1^st Cor. 15) would solve the problem.  The first perfect man, Adam, made a bad choice; the second perfect man, Jesus, made the right choice – over and over and over again, eventually going to the cross to undo the mess Adam made.  We have the choice now of realigning ourselves with God through Christ.

What a wonderful world this would be if all of us availed ourselves of Christ and the Word – truly, not just on Sunday mornings. 

And this world has no idea how much of Satanic evil is being restrained by God.  We always ask why God allows evil, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is “What would things be like if God weren’t holding the ultimate reins?”  Humans will know exactly how bad evil really is when the Seven Seals are opened during the aptly named Tribulation. 

I won’t be here for that, and if you have any sense, you won’t be either.

John 14:6  “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes unto the Father except by me.”

http://bible.org/article/angelology-doctrine-angels
 

*from Sabbaths 1979  by Wendell Berry

To sit and look at light-filled leaves

May let us see, or seem to see,

Far backward as through clearer eyes

To what unsighted hope believes:

The blessed conviviality

That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise,

Time when the Maker’s radiant sight

Made radiant every thing He saw,

And every thing He saw was filled

With perfect joy and life and light.

His perfect pleasure was sole law;

No pleasure had become self-willed.

For all His creatures were His pleasures

And their whole pleasure was to be

What He made them; they sought no gain

Or growth beyond their proper measures,

Nor longed for change or novelty.

The only new thing could be pain.

The Limitations of God -- God Logic III

 I occasionally get into discussions with people who question why God allows bad things to happen, but it’s not a difficult question if you consider the limitations of God.

Blasphemy, anyone?  Dare we limit God?  We couldn’t, of course.  We humans have struggled for 5,000 years to mold our measly minds around the absoluteness of God, let alone pin Him down enough to shove Him into a box of our making.

He limits Himself. And no, the use of the masculine pronoun does not indicate the presence of a divine penis.  “She” carries even more gender baggage than “he,” and “it” denies the personhood of God and we’re right back to graven images.  So let's get over it.

God limits Himself with His perfections.  I know of ten, and these attributes are limited only by His other attributes. Let’s look at these absolutes:

• God is power, sovereignty;  He is the King of Kings (Psalm 83:18)*.  OK then, why can ‘t He do anything He wants? Let’s look –
• God is also perfect goodness, and if He is to maintain that, then He’s limited to doing only good things (Psalm 145:17).  But can’t He change and be bad for a while?
• God is unchangeable (Hebrews 1:12).  Hmm, so he’s stuck with goodness.
• God is perfect justice  (Hebrews 10:31).  So He’s limited to being fair and not just now and then. Always.  And He can’t change that, either.
• God is love (John 3:16). But what about His justice?  God cannot say, “There, there, now.  It’s all right.  I’ll let you get away with it this time.” Not if His justice is perfect.  Oh dear.  
• God is omniscient (Proverbs 3:19). This is useful if you have to be perfectly fair.  It helps to know the facts.   This attribute isn’t limiting; it allows the other attributes to function.
• God is omnipresent (Job 34:21,22); He is not limited by space.  Man has spent most of his existence trying to circumvent space.  God doesn’t have to.
• God is eternal (Exodus 3:14). He is not confined by time.  He always was and always will be. For God the future has no surprises or uncertainties, which aides His omniscience.
• God is truth (Deuteronomy 32:4). He is limited by His inability to lie.  Because He’s omniscient He knows the future and the past in perfect detail; He can’t even claim ignorance or error.
• God is omnipotent (Genesis 17:1).  We’re back to power again, only this isn’t a matter of authority. It’s power in the physical sense of the word.  There’s nothing God doesn’t have the power to do.  However, there’s justice and righteousness and love and truth and immutability to consider. 

The interconnections between the perfections of God, and the relationship of the three members of the trinity, one with another, have produced the envelope of grace that is available to us all.

* Check out this web site for more Biblical references and explanation of what is called the Essence of God. <http://www.realtime.net/~wdoud/topics/essence.html>

There be Angels

 I want to tell you about angels. I want to talk about the real thing, though, not the heavily draped Renaissance types with the big, feathered wings -- a lovely image and maybe Raphael had a vision, but I’m not convinced.  Both the Greek and the Hebrew words translated “angel” are words that mean “messenger,” and we know from Biblical accounts that they brought messages to Mary and Elizabeth, that they announced the “good tidings” of Christ’s birth.  They did the latter while suspended in the air, frightening and amazing the shepherds in the fields by Bethlehem.    We know they appear in dreams, that they are observing us, and that they occasionally show up as humans, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares, “ (Heb 13:2). 

I may have done so.

Almost two years ago Tom had to undergo surgery for highly aggressive prostate cancer. We chose to have the surgery done in Seattle at the University of Washington Medical Center – one of the five best hospitals in the country.  When the worst happens, I want the best to help me.  So we headed north. 

The day before the surgery we checked into the Collegiana Inn, a 1920’s hotel on a shady, sleepy side street in the University District.  The entrance, framed by a stone arch, red carriage lanterns, and a matching awning, led to a small foyer with warm green walls and black-framed landscapes.  I loved the place at first sight. 

The building had been used for years as a dorm and the rooms themselves still had that feel, but they were clean and quiet and spacious – a perfect place for the days of recuperation Tom would need after surgery.  There were long skylit hallways for walking, cozy little sitting rooms for a change of scene, and a kitchen on each floor, which made eating decently possible.  With a coffee shop at the top of the hill and a Trader Joe’s just a couple picturesque blocks away, we were set. The streets were lined with hole-in-the-wall restaurants and bookstores.  The sidewalks were filled with college students and their backpacks.  (In a year our grandson would be one of those students.) What could have been a nightmarish experience in a parking lot motel out by SeaTac, became a safe, comfortable, friendly experience. 

The day of the surgery we reported to the hospital at 5:30 in the morning.  It was still dark, but the surgery pavilion buzzed with organized activity.   By 7:30 Tom was wheeled into surgery.  I had no idea that I wouldn’t see him for seven hours.  Waiting room time is slow, and that day it had very heavy feet.  I filled it with coffee, a book I couldn’t concentrate on, people I kept thinking I recognized, the art on the walls.  Halfway through the morning our daughter arrived and time stepped back a ways, quit breathing down my neck; she and I are good at conversation.  Lunch came and went.  The surgery had been scheduled to last between one and four hours.  By 2:00 I was getting nervous – ok, ok – more nervous.  Finally, on the downside of the afternoon the OR nurse called to let me know it was over, an hour later an encouraging chat with the surgeon, by eight Deanie and I were on our way back to the inn. 

We were hungry.  I was exhausted.  We picked up some frozen spanakopita at Trader Joe’s and popped it in the microwave in the kitchen on our floor of the hotel.   We were sipping the last of our wine when three women arrived.  They spoke softly to each other and rather than disturb us at the table, they gathered around a credenza covered with magazines where they tried to pour out bowls of cereal without setting anything down. 

I wasn’t in a very social frame of mind, but we couldn’t leave them standing around munching cereal in silence.  So we invited them to join us  -- and I’ll never forget the experience.

One woman was about my age, her hair a salt-and-pepper bob.  She smiled and I realized that there was something odd about her mouth – not unattractive, but crooked or slanted – something asymmetrical.  With her was another woman of the same age – a handsome woman with a spikey crew cut – I figured her for a sister-in-law.  With them was a much younger woman, tall and heavy in a soft, pillowy way.  Her dark brown hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck. 

In a hospital hotel you can count on one opening conversational gambit and being tired – post-terror tired – too tired to even introduce myself, I asked it.  “What are you in for?” I don’t suppose I phrased it so badly, or if I did, they were gracious and answered.  Here’s their story:

Gray-lady, who was recovering from her battle with breast cancer, and whose husband had recently died, was the mother of a thirty-year-old man (husband of the young woman) who had contracted a virus a year or so earlier.  The virus had attacked his heart and in the year following he and his wife had produced a baby son, who was just a month old. This man had been recently diagnosed with congestive heart failure and a cancerous tumor on his pancreas.  He was scheduled for surgery the following morning and had only about a 50% chance of living through the procedure, which may or may not take care of the tumor and would do nothing to help his heart. 

This sounds like a sob story, but it wasn’t.  The women laughed and joked as they told it.  Their smiles were soft and lovely.  There was no whine in their voices.  I’ll never forget their eyes.  Those ladies should have looked gaunt and haunted, their eyes hollow and vacant.  There should have been deep worry lines between their brows.  Tears would have been normal.  Pacing, hand-wringing, voices shaky and taut.

After all, the young father of a new baby was likely to die, if not the next day, sometime soon.  The grandmother of this baby, a recent widow, was losing her son,  and was still not on solid footing with her own health.  The aunt was apparently the only support system for these two ladies.   Some sobbing and railing was in order.  But no, they were happily eating Fruit Loops with two strangers in an obscure little hotel at bedtime.  They weren’t just relaxed and apparently happy; they glowed. 

They did eventually ask us about our plight.  I felt embarrassed to explain.  Tom’s brush with cancer seemed a mere hangnail in comparison.  In fact that’s how I answered – a hang nail, just a hang nail. 

Deanie and I went back to our room soon after.  I asked the mother if she would mind if we prayed for her and her son.  She patted me on the arm, nodded and said, “Please.”

The next night, with Tom tucked safely away in our room,  I popped into the kitchen now and then hoping I’d see them.  I never did.  Several months later when we returned for Tom’s check up I asked Sherrie Pollard, who ran the hotel, if she remembered them. Sherrie always took the time to get to know her guests and I was sure their story would ring a bell, but she couldn’t remember them. 

I owe those three nameless women.  That night I had felt as if I’d just staggered away from the wrong end of a street brawl.  It had been three terrifying months of research and dread since Tom’s diagnosis.  It had been a long trip and a long scary day, but the grace and loveliness of those ladies in the face of a nightmare I can barely wrap my brain around relaxed me to the bone.  God had led us to a great surgeon (at almost two years still no sign of cancer), a great hospital,  a lovely little inn, and I wonder if He didn’t also send three angels to pull all my pieces back together. 

If it so happens that one of you lovely women finds this and reads it – let me know how you are.  But then, maybe you are looking over my shoulder as I write this.  Who knows?

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares, “ (Heb 13:2).

I Dare You

 Today I’m posting a sonnet from my first chapbook Counterpane. 

For my poetry-phobic followers, a sonnet is a 14-line poem, invented during the Renaissance by an Italian poet named Petrarch, who evidently enjoyed playing with people’s heads – even his own.  Not only does a sonnet have to be 14 lines, but it has a required rhyme scheme – either abbaabbacdcdcd (Petrarchian) or ababcdcdefefgg (Shakesperian). 

To top it all off each line can only have 10 syllables and those syllables have to be emphasized alternately – it’s called iambic pentameter.  IP is actually rather scary because once you get the hang of writing in that rhythm you discover that you are thinking in that rhythm as well – and it’s hard to turn off. 

I’ll have some questions for you at the end of the poem, but for now figure out if this in a Petrarchian (also called Italian) or a Shakespearian (also called Elizabethan) sonnet.  Enjoy.

Summer Sonnet                  D Chadwell Each summer I am given perfect plums Which grow without my love or watered care Yet fill with cool moist sweetness, bees’ soft hums That haze through August’s heated golden air. I can no longer number all that flows Full though my world in wild prolific flight. My providential cup now overflows With good work, love, and loveliness, and light. But plums are watered down through dismal days That fall like rain but feel more like regret, Like sorrow, sadness. hurt and hollow praise That drown my days and worry at me …yet When heat and sun are high and summer comes, I know I will be granted perfect plums.

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 Response Questions    :-)  (I can't help it -- sorry.)

What – or who -- is gracing your summer? 

What  dismal days brought you  -- or are bringing you to your plums? 

Why do we love summer so much? 

a)     Are we trained to do so by eons of public schooling?

b)    Is it just a sun thing and purely physical?

c)     Or is it spiritual – a realization of life?

d)    Who cares?

Yes – it’s a Shakespearian sonnet.  Good job.   If you’re interested in trying to write one check the right hand column for sonnet tips.  Try it; it’s fun.  Much like those black and white plastic number puzzles we used to play with.  Your have to play with word order a lot.

Tirade II

We’ve  Been  Caught  in a Compromising  Position

I’ve come to hate the word “compromise” even though being willing to “compromise” is touted as one of the world’s great virtues.  Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines the word as the act of  “com[ing] to agreement by mutual concession.” That sounds harmless, generally benevolent, and in most interpersonal situations it’s a necessity in maintaining relationships:

You want to paint the living room blue, your spouse wants it yellow, so you paint it green.  That’s benign compromise  -- win/win.  The room gets painted, you each get a little of what you wanted, and you can get on to the next disagreement.

Your kids want pepperoni, you want chicken and artichoke, so you order a half- and-half pizza.  No problem. 

Heck, I’m schizoid enough I’ve even negotiated with myself. Yes you can have the chocolate chips, but you will have to walk 2 miles.

Lately, however, I’ve been sickened by the malignant compromise going on in Washington.  You see, compromise is only productive in non-moral situations. Compromise is pragmatic; it is not virtuous.  It won’t work to say to the jihadists –You want to kill all the Jews?  Let’s compromise and say you’ll only kill the ones on the West Bank.

That’s not compromise; that’s moral outrage -- to say nothing of naïve stupidity. 

Congress is currently busy batting such compromises back and forth like dead birds. None can work because

a)    paying one’s debts and obligations is a moral mandate; as is spending no more than you earn, as is not selling one’s soul, personally or nationally -- and

b)    b) this is not just a two-sided issue (in spite of the deceptive simplicity of the two-party system): it is a tangle of Gordian proportions.  A little give and take isn’t going to straighten anything out.

Compromise requires a clear, uncluttered middle ground, and one which is only reachable if neither side is morally  -- may I say it? – compromised.  On the left we have the rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul mentality, the something-for-nothing mythology.  On the right is the speak-softly-and-carry-no-stick attitude that is every bit as responsible for our current plight. Our soaring debt isn’t about helping people, or stimulating the economy: it’s about buying power.  As a free people we shouldn’t be willing to compromise on that.

Here we have both parties neither of whom (with the exception of the freshman Republicans) can conceive of winning an election without purchasing votes -- not  even the much-maligned rich can provide the money for that to continue. The Chinese are losing their loan enthusiasm.  Our ponzi schemes are going weak in the knees.  Businesses are gagging on regulations and taxes, which they can’t or won’t pay. Most of these problems are the result of that same compromising I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you’ll-scratch-mine mentality that Washington is currently using in an attempt to solve the problem it created. 

  

I didn’t mean to rant, but here’s the problem:  if a compromise is reached that ignores the moral (and Constitutional) issues at the heart of the problem, no good will come of it.  You see, things are immoral, not because God is a fuss-budget, but because immoral activities have negative results.  This debt problem is no exception.  Eric Sevareid once said, “The chief cause of problems is solutions.”

We’ve been caught in a compromising position.  Buckle your seat belts.  


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Check this out -- I just ran across it:   http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,777705,00.html

Tirade I

Warning – Sometimes I get mad.  If a post is labeled as this one is either suck it up and read bravely what I have to say, or duck and cover.  I’ll get over it and write something more cheerful next week.     Unless I get mad again. 

Where is Truth?

During the civil trials of Jesus Christ, Pontius Pilate asked him –while he stood there battered and bloody, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).   Jesus didn’t answer Pilate – perhaps his tone made it clear that he didn’t really want an answer.  Regardless, the question is The Question, but day after day I am reminded that whatever Truth is, our modern society values no more than it values virginity.

Case in point – the Atlanta public schools.  Earlier this month the Atlanta Constitution reported that for the last decade 178 educators, working in 44 schools and in the central administration, falsified the results for the state’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.  They actually donned rubber gloves, erased the little penciled  “bubbles,” and replaced erroneous answers.  They got startlingly improved scores using this method.  (Vogell)

At the other end of the school continuum, students, the vast majority of them, are turning cheating into a fine, electronic art.  According to a study done by the Center for Youth Ethics at the Josephson Institute in Los Angeles 64% admitted to cheating on tests within the last year.  In the same study 82% said they copied homework.  (USNews – Education) 

In a small study done in a Midwestern town the stats were even worse – between 74 and 87% percent admitted to some form of cheating on tests (Ramirez).  These industrious young people have at their disposal dozens of new techniques – phone-photos  of the test sent to your buddy in the next class,  a quick, surreptitious blackberry Google search,  a little thumb-dancing under the desk.  The truly innovative will even hack into the computerized grade book and just assign himself a grade, adjust his attendance records – the possibilities are endless.

I did my own checking with a Google search for “essays for sale.” (As an English teacher I was always on the lookout for plagiarized papers.) The search garnered over 28,000.000 results.  Twenty-eight million!  That means that millions of people are making money by helping students cheat, and that they evidently have plenty of customers. 

I have been aware that over the expanse of my career Truth as an absolute value has been going out of style.  The student who most didactically pounded on her desk and declared, “There’s no such thing as absolute truth!” wasn’t my first clue, but it’s one that’s stuck with me.  She may have been a very bright girl, but she didn’t come up with that one on her own. 

In an effort to find that non-existent middle ground, where no one is offended and no thinking has to take place, school curricula have grabbed the relativist philosophy with a white-knuckled grip.  My darling student had learned her lessons well. 

And you can’t help realizing how close the relativist mantra is to plagiarizing a paper.  Why look up facts if none of them is true?  Why bother writing a paper if you can just buy one? Who cares whether or not you implicitly lie by sneaking a peek at the test questions beforehand?  Why memorize stuff if nothing’s true? 

Of course the next question is -- Why bother cheating on a test if your teacher will do that for you? 

We spend upwards of $10,000 per student per year on public education, and for that we get a whole generation of con artists?  Oops – 2 generations, counting the Atlanta teachers,  and I doubt they’re the only ones pressured to use deception to “prove” they’ve left no student behind. 

I’m beginning to see this tirade as more of a book than a post, so I’ll close, but let me say this:

I have spent most of my life in a classroom, either sitting in a desk or standing before rows of them.  I have heartily believed in what I was doing there, whether learning or teaching, and I had the naïve idea that it was all connected to this concept of Truth.  Just stop and think; if we’re not teaching Truth, we have to be teaching lies.   The middle ground just doesn’t exist.

What is truth?  I doubt if many of our nation’s students have a clue.

Works Cited

“Most High School Students Cheat.”  Live Science.  May 2010.      http://www.livescience.com/8254-high-school-students-cheat.html

Ramirez, Eddy. “Cheating on the Rise Among High School Students.” USNews – Education.  December 2. 2008. http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/on-education/2008/12/02/cheating-on-the-rise-among-high-school-students

Vogell,, Heather. “Investigation into APS cheating finds unethical behavior across every level.” The Atlanda Constitution. July 6, 2011. http://sweetness-light.com/archive/atlanta-teachers-cheated-for-better-scores.