May 2011

Seen & Heard Today

This past weekend, I heard my friend Steve Fry preach at a conference.  Among other things, his message examined our therapeutic approach to God.  Great line: “Israel wasn’t healed from Egypt; they were freed from Egypt.”

I like gadgets. My iPhone 4 is one of my favorites. I plan to buy more; I really do want/need an iPad2. But, I also deeply resonate to this Washington Post article.

The relationship between humans and pets is such a profound mystery.  This story really throws a yard light on that mystery.  Touching.

These Moment of Impact photos will just blow your socks off.  In fact, I’m sure this guy could do EXACTLY that.

So an academic strikes up a conversation with a seat mate — a guy who has earthbound experience in this economy.  Really Good article by Stephen Carter in Bloomberg.  “Economic Stagnation Explained at 30,000 Feet.”

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Aeroponic Culture

Several years ago, I visited Walt Disney World’s “Living with the Land” display.  That exhibit features “aeroponic” fruits and vegetables — plants that grow in the air.  I vividly remember the tomatoes circulating through the nutrient-rich air on a conveyor belt.  Amazing; completely exposed roots, and tomatoes boiling out the ends of the plant.

That astonishing exhibition has become, for me, a metaphor of our culture. We live in a hothouse.  Ideas, products, and even political figures just seem to materialize in midair.

For example, four years before he was elected President of the United States and de facto leader of the free world, Barack Obama was essentially unknown.  In many ways, he still is.

Consider aeroponic economics: In the three weeks since Osama Bin Laden was killed, a few eager entrepreneurs have made millions selling tee-shirts that celebrate his death.  Instant wealth; dollars boiling out the end of a PayPal account.

As I’ve spent time in this hothouse, I’ve thought much about what this means for the issue of leadership.  Historically, we followed people because they were parents, village elders, rabbis, very wealthy, or the ones with the guns.

Obviously, today’s culture grants credence and authority much faster and easier.

So, what does it take to establish credibility in the aeroponic culture?

According to Seth Godin, all it takes is a story.  In a recent posting, he wrote, “Too often marketers take a product and try to invent a campaign. Much more effective is to find…A story that resonates and a tribe that’s tight and small and eager…Sell a story that some people want to believe. In fact, sell a story they already believe.”

He’s right. That’s how the “nutrients” in our aeroponic culture recently produced one enormous (and weird) fruit.  It all started when an elderly, and very obscure, man said the world would end on May 21. Nothing unusual there; people have always espoused strange opinions. Most of them sit on porches, whittling, and talking to themselves.  But that story was embraced by a small, tight, and eager tribe — the apocalyptic crowd. And (assisted by a bored and immature news industry) it grew very fast and very large.

Think of it; a completely non-biblical idea roared into great credibility with a tribe that takes the Bible literally.

Yes, it was a story they already believed.  I grew up in a branch of that “tight and small and eager” tribe.  Our tribal storytellers (preachers) regularly tried to scare the hell out of us by repeating a story we all believed.  Perhaps all such “fruit,” aeroponic or not, leaps from a story.

However, the most relevant question for us is: How do we conduct ourselves in the aeroponic culture?

Navigating the low-hanging fruit can be tricky.  Things appear very suddenly all around us.  We have no warning at all.  In fact, we often have to duck or weave to avoid getting clobbered by some new and shiny product, idea, image, etc.

But the “new” fruit really isn’t new at all.  An apple is an apple.  The matrix of growth really isn’t relevant.

Humans have always had the choice in how to respond to things that appear in their environment.  Wisely or foolishly.

Don’t you wish everyone knew that, when “strange fruit” appears in front of us, we don’t have to talk about it, blog it, Facebook it, preach against it, YouTube it, write books about it, or even attack it.

If we choose any of those responses, we become part of the nutrients that grow it.

But, some will ask, “Doesn’t it demand a response?  Don’t we have a responsibility to stand up for truth?”

It doesn’t, but even if it did, the best way to do that is to be quiet. According to Proverb 26:20, “For lack of wood the fire goes out, And where there is no whisperer, contention quiets down.”

That is true in any time, any place, and in any kind of growth conditions.

Let’s try it.


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Seen & Heard Today

My brother, Vernon, went to a funeral in Colorado last weekend. He so loved the simple pine box casket. Here’s the website. http://www.naturescasket.com/index.html

So, what could be better than wine or chocolate?  Having them together.  Seriously, this article sure convinced me that good health require eating chocolate while drinking wine.

This little gem from REASON — “Dear Congress, Your Credit Application Has Been Turned Down — is laser-guided, funny, and priceless.

I’ve now lost 20 pounds since January!  Just had to tell somebody.

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Seen & Heard Today

Every Saturday, the online Wall Street Journal carries a “Five Best Books” column. Written by an expert on certain themes, each one features his or her opinion of the five best books on that topic. I read it every Saturday. This past Saturday’s edition is on the essential reading of World War 2.

This Fred Astaire dance will blow your socks off.  5:38 long and obviously done in one long shot.  And, how on earth did he dance on the ceiling?  This was before sophisticated graphics and special effects.  Thanks to the Internet Monk for posting this.

Netspeak is a new (at least to me) website which helps you to find a phrase or quote when you can only remember part of it.  I thank Seth Godin’s blog for passing this along.

Elizabeth Scalia posted a very interesting essay on placing periods outside of quotation marks.  I too have noticed that periods are creeping outside the closing quotation mark.  The piece also diverts into semicolons.  Very entertaining.

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Seen & Heard Today

George Will has turned 70.  His column on the wonders of reaching three score and ten is a delight.

Nice piece on martinis.  Carries another version of Churchill’s recipe for martinis…glance at the vermouth while pouring the gin.

Good news: analysts expect gasoline to drop 75 cents per gallon by summer.  I paid $4.17 in Gatlinburg a few days ago.  Highest of my life.  The lowest, you ask?  14 cents per gallon.  1968.  Shawnee, Oklahoma.

This post from John Goodman’s blog on health care is one brilliant analysis.  Short version: we could easily spend ALL our national budget on health care.  So, what is the point where we have to cut back?

I spent some time in Boise, Idaho this week.  One thing I learned.  It is pronounced BoiSe, not BoiZe.

 

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Questions & Answers

A famous American politician once boarded a Washington to Los Angeles flight, settled into his first class window seat, and prepared for a long nap.  The aisle seat was empty; he expected no intrusions.

But a young man approached and asked if an equally famous and very controversial Muslim minister could sit with him a few minutes.  The politician recognized that the Muslim could have come directly and forced the issue.  Instead, he acted in wisdom and grace by sending an emissary.  Quite contrary to his public personality, he did not storm the gates.  The politician told the young assistant that he would glad to talk to the leader.

A minute later, the grandiloquent and polarizing minister slipped into the seat.  They ended up talking almost four hours.  They spoke of days of childhood; of parents, siblings, and spouses; and of triumphs and tragedies.  The politician told me, “I liked him very much.”

I thought of that story recently when I read a new poll from the Pew Research Center.   The poll sought to identify the “political typology” of respondents.  As I scanned the questions, I realized I would not answer any of them.  They were too cold and reductive.

For example, on the issue of immigration, the only choices were:

  • Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.
  • Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health.

 

Think about the innumerable reasons and patterns behind immigration.  They are as complex and mysterious as the kaleidoscopic patterns of global weather or infection.  The survival choices faced by some people are myriad, brutal and heartbreaking.

Yet, an arbitrary set of questions tries to reduce all of that into a flattened and simplistic binary code.

People are magnificently complicated and unfathomable bundles of flesh and spirit.  Contradictory and endlessly variegated.

An African-American friend once told me, “As a black man, it is more important to me that you respect me than that you understand me.”

Those words changed my life.  In that moment, I knew he spoke for everyone on the planet.  We must respect, handle carefully, and wait to be invited into the secret gardens.  Respect should precede understanding.  We just cannot regard anyone lightly.

To slice-and-dice the human bundles, for whatever reasons, is to disrespect and dehumanize people.  Yet, the structures of today’s life do exactly that with increasing frequency and severity.

As I pay for a bag of bolts at the hardware store, the gum-chewing clerk – one third my age – suddenly blurts, “What’s your phone number?”

The only appropriate answer is, “None of your damned business.”

At the grocery store, I give a twenty-dollar-bill for $19.37 of merchandise.  The clerk says, “Want to give your change to a homeless shelter?”  Think of it; the free market now trains agents to ask that people robotically break off a piece of themselves for an amorphous notion.

I choose to bless people because of the generosity of God in my life.   But I do that on my (and His) terms.  I am very careful about opening the private garden of my thoughts or feelings to strangers.

I resent being merchandized, politicized, and…groped!  I sometimes wonder why and how our society ever granted such audacious authority to the TSA and other bureaucracies.  Or, how our personal information become digitized and open commodities.

Why and when did we first allow the barbarians to crash through our gates?  I think it may have started with our lack of vigilance and self-respect when asked personal questions.   In the words of Hosea 7:9, we gave our strength to strangers.

Perhaps refusing to answer intrusive and reductive questions from strangers will be the first step in reclaiming what we have lost.

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Seen & Heard Today

This video of 300,000 starlings in flight is hypnotically beautiful.  It’s like catching a fleeting glimpse of God’s perfection.

Michael Hyatt’s blog is one of the very best.  His latest posting is so valuable.

I do not know Dan Bouchelle, but I appreciate this piece in his “Confessions of a Former Preacher” blog.  This particular essay is on resisting the urge to squash hope in the young.  Anyone over 40 should read it.

I really love Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.”  A recent edition carried this gorgeous and evocative poem.

The tao of touch

by Marge Piercy

What magic does touch create
that we crave it so. That babies
do not thrive without it. That
the nurse who cuts tough nails
and sands calluses on the elderly
tells me sometimes men weep
as she rubs lotion on their feet.

Yet the touch of a stranger
the bumping or predatory thrust
in the subway is like a slap.
We long for the familiar, the open
palm of love, its tender fingers.
It is our hands that tamed cats
into pets, not our food.

The widow looks in the mirror
thinking, no one will ever touch
me again, never. Not hold me.
Not caress the softness of my
breasts, my inner thighs, the swell
of my belly. Do I still live
if no one knows my body?

We touch each other so many
ways, in curiosity, in anger,
to command attention, to soothe,
to quiet, to rouse, to cure.
Touch is our first language
and often, our last as the breath
ebbs and a hand closes our eyes.

“The tao of touch” by Marge Piercy, from The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems, 1980-2010. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Reprinted with permission

 

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Same Kind of Different as Me

Ron Hall and Denver Moore, the co-authors of “Same Kind of Different as Me” (Thomas Nelson, 2006) are not writers. In fact, Moore cannot even read.

But, these guys have somehow produced one riveting book (yes, I know a ghostwriter pulled it all together). This is a true story and one you’ve not read before. And, let me tell you, it will grab you by the throat and pull sounds from your windpipe which you have possibly not heard before. More than once, I inhaled or cried out so suddenly that I startled my cats and other coffee drinkers at Starbucks (separate situations; I don’t take my cats to Starbucks).

Trust me; it is best to read this book alone.

“Same Kind of Different as Me” starts in vastly different places: a sharecroppers brutal world (almost impossible to believe this was 20th century America) and the very elite — caviar and corporate jets — universe of an international art dealer. Then, the threads are pulled together in Fort Worth.

This is a “Christian” book, but it is not stereotypical at all. It bores into some very different and vividly-drawn people and does so very honestly. The large-canvas story is told in several incredible narratives of wealth, poverty, adultery, illness, hospitalization, and being black in America. Along the way, it delivers powerhouse insight on loss, grace, living and dying, the veil between this life and the next, seeing with new eyes, and the (most riveting for me) the creature’s eternal yearning.

Through it all, you will find yourself viewing homeless and “dangerous” types differently than ever before. In fact, that is part of the message. We’re all different and we’re all the same: homeless, noble, peace-loving, dangerous, rich and poor, lost and found. Our culture has created something of an artificial chasm between us. It magnifies our differences and ignores our similarities. But, in fact, we’re all the same kind of different.

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