AnotherThink

In the land of tigers and elephants

2012-05-10T09:41:56Z

Sawat-dee-kahp. Good health and salutations from Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I have been attending a conference for the past ten days and playing the tourist in my spare time. My travels usually take me to Latin America, especially Mexico. My first visit to Thailand has been a unique and enjoyable experience.

Thais are hospitable, gracious and kindhearted towards the thousands of foreigners like me who come here to enjoy the amazing food, the tropical gardens, and the exotic wonders of this land of silk and tigers, ancient temples and elephants. Thai script is completely unintelligible to westerners and the Thai language is very complex. But because tourism is such a huge part of Chiang Mai's income, stores and restaurants often (mercifully) print signs and menus in both Thai and English, and many people here speak enough English to communicate with you on very basic levels. This makes the place quite accessible to a drop-in tourist like myself.

Chiang Mai is in the northern forests of Thailand, about equidistant between Burma and Laos. It was established as a trading center in 1296, and constructed as a walled city surrounded by a moat to protect against Burmese invasions. The moat, parts of the wall and its gates still survive, and have been re-purposed as a linear park that surrounds the city's core, a place where families and couples gather, and vendors set up tables in the cool of the evening to sell their wares.

Thailand's forests have been a major source of teak, a wood prized in boat building because if its resistance to rot. Around the turn of the century, Thai labor gangs felled heavy teak trees and used elephants to move the logs to a river, where they were floated to sawmills downstream. The British built a railroad into the area to encourage greater commerce, with the unintended effect of exposing the beauty of this country to the outside world and stimulating the tourist industry, still a major part of the economy to this day.

Thailand is about 95% Buddhist. Ornate Buddhist wats are found throughout the city, usually guarded by golden dragons and other mythological monsters. I took some time to visit the Wat Phrasingha where the huge Sing Buddha towers peacefully over the quiet room as men and women kneel down in prayer, or are blessed by monks sitting in meditation around the edge of the room. The Sing Buddha was a gift from a prince at the end of WWII, and has a particular pose that you see frequently in local Buddha statues: sitting in the typical cross-legged posture with the right hand draped over the knee and the left upturned in the Buddha's lap. When you enter the wat you leave your shoes outside, and a sign asks foreigners to "dress politely," offering wraps to women who are not adequately covered. There was no prohibition against taking photos, but I did so quietly and to the side, trying not to disturb the worshipers.

The standard greeting in Thailand is not a wave or a handshake but a wai: palms together with fingers pointing at the chin and thumbs against the chest, ended with a slight bow of the head. Even the Ronald McDonald statues in the ubiquitous fast food chain greet customers with a wai.

Thailand is a very respectful culture, and Thais pay special respect to the elderly, to Buddhist monks, and especially to their much beloved King, whose photo is displayed everywhere. Shop keepers will offer a wai when you enter the store and are delighted if you take the initiative to wai them upon entering. I watched an old man walking ahead of me on the sidewalk as he had to divert because of an obstruction by slightly moving into the entry of a Buddhist wat. Before continuing on, he stopped and bowed towards the temple, then continued on his way. A man sitting on a bench gave a bow to a friend passing by on a motorcycle. Thais seem to be used to tourists neglecting the wai, but appreciate it when we make the attempt. With a little practice, bowing becomes second nature.

On one of my walks through the city it occurred to me how quiet and orderly traffic was compared to Latin America. I don't think I've yet heard a horn honk here, and I haven't seen anyone driving aggressively. Getting across the busy streets as a pedestrian is challenging, but more because of the sheer flood of cars and motorbikes and tuk tuks pouring down the road, not because everyone is driving as fast as they can.

]]> The flavors in Thai food are just amazing. I've always loved Thai cooking, which is frequently spicy and often makes liberal use of curry and coconut milk. I've tried a number of small, family run restaurants here, and the food has always been fresh and delicious. In many of these places the kitchen is out in the dining area, so you get to watch the cook preparing the meal, always in a wok heated over a gas flame. I had a Thai curry prawn dish where the prawns were a good six inches long from nose to tail. A friend took advantage of a day-long class in Thai cooking and came away with a better understanding of the local ingredients used. Of course, there are lots of places that cater to tourists, such as one restaurant positioned near the Tae Phae gate that claimed to have the best burritos this side of the Rio Grande River.

At sundown along the eastern side of the city, vendors set up tables and booths up and down the sidewalks, opening the popular "night market" to tourists and Thais alike. You'll find silk ties and Thai boxing shorts, silver and jade and turquoise jewelry, hand-painted enamelware, wood carvings of elephants and Buddhas, delicate flowers carved from bars of soap, knock off Rolex watches, art work, handicrafts, and t-shirts of every description. Prices are usually marked, but sticker price is just the starting point — vendors assume you will ask for a better price. "Just for you, American man, we give special discount."

It's the rainy season now, with thunderstorms coming through almost every day. As I went out to stroll through the city on Sunday, a storm rolled in and I didn't have an umbrella. I ducked into a multistory electronics mall and spent some time looking around through dozens of stores selling computers, motherboards, chips, peripherals — and for some odd reason I'm not sure of, the hallways were lined with tables full of ladies' underwear. Maybe guys come looking for the hottest computer and drag along their girlfriends, who use the time to pick up a new bra?

Anyway, in a store that sold mice and game controllers I found a bin full of umbrellas with cartoon characters on them. I bought a blue one with two bears surrounded by hearts for $2.50, and it kept me dry for the rest of the day.

I'll be leaving about midnight, flying from here to Seoul, South Korea, then to LA, then down to Mexico for some more meetings. I have an 8-hour layover in Seoul, so I'm going to try to make a quick tour of the city if I can. Both my flights over the Pacific have been on Korean Air's new Airbus A380 double-decker jet, a very comfortable plane, especially for very long flights, but one so big that it is just plain disturbing to think that it can actually fly. More legroom than usual, though, and that is much appreciated.

I'll have more to say about my trip to Thailand in another post. If you ever get the chance to visit here, by all means do. Thailand is a beautiful country that goes out of its way to make guests feel welcome.

Anything: Yielding to an unsafe God

2012-04-18T15:50:21Z

"Then Aslan isn't safe?" asked Lucy.

"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver. "Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you." — The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

What might happen if I put my career, my hopes and desires, my present and my future all into God's hands and prayed a simple but sincere prayer, "Lord, I will do anything you ask. Anything."

That prayer, and God's response to it is the life-changing challenge of Jennie Allen's new book "Anything: the prayer that unlocked my God and my Soul." (Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2011).

The Jesus of the New Testament made people uncomfortable, he shook up the status quo, he asked his disciples to set aside everything that competed with him. And in response to his challenge in their lives, the book of Acts shows how those ordinary Galileans changed history. But a case can be made that we have made the Jesus of American Christianity into a soft-spoken, smiling Mr. Rogers, and our churches into places where we can all relax in our sweaters and slippers until heaven arrives.

Jennie Allen's dreams included all the normal Hallmark card sweetness of a nice home, a loving husband, beautiful children, pleasant neighbors, and a faith that was challenging without being rude. But something a professor had said to her years earlier kept coming back to her: God becomes most real when we risk placing our lives and our future into his unseen hands and wait for him to come through.

If C.S. Lewis is right and God isn't safe, we should be surprised that our faith has led us to settle down into a quiet cul-de-sac where we can watch eternity go by on our wide-screen TVs. And if he is also right that God is good, we can trust him, even when he leads us far out of our comfort zones.

Jennie Allen's "Anything" is a challenging and engaging journal of the faith journey God took her on as she asked the questions we all ask, "Who is God and what does he want from me?" It is written in the intimate, conversational style of a friend who opens her heart across the table in your local coffee shop, but it's one of those conversations where you walk away knowing that the Spirit has just challenged you to re-examine your faith, your priorities, and every assumption you have made about God's desires for your life.

Joy comes from giving yourself entirely and unreservedly to God. Like ripping a Band-Aid off, giving in, yielding everything, and dying to this life and all we think we want in it — something about that sets you free.

Everything I was worried about didn't seem so important. Everything I was afraid of didn't seem that scary. Everything I wanted before seemed trite. Everything I doubted about God seemed foolish.

Instead, I felt as though God had placed me in a new reality; a new story that would climax when I met him face-to-face in heaven...

Jesus says the way we glorify God, the way we step into his story, is by accomplishing the work God gives us to do. Jesus glorified his father on earth by doing that very thing. We play our part in his story, and the beauty is, it was what we were made for.

— excerpt from Anything, by Jennie Allen

Human nature lulls us into quietness and routine. If Christianity has become a toothless, hobbled lion, it is not because God has changed. In Anything, Jennie Allen issues a challenge to Christians to set God free to work powerfully in us and through us, beginning with a simple but bold prayer, "Anything, Lord. I will do anything you ask."

Distant relatives

2012-04-15T06:00:00Z

The sons of Zerah were Zimri, Ethan, Heman, Calcol, and Darda-five in all. The son of Carmi (a descendant of Zimri) was Achan, who brought disaster on Israel by taking plunder that had been set apart for the LORD. — 1 Chronicles 2:6-7, NLT

No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;
if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a Promontory were,
as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee. — John Donne, 1624

My brother and I have been working on tracing our family history. My Aunt Adelaide, my mother's sister, had done most of the work on my mother's side of the family, but we had little more than family legend on my father's side of the tree. Bob and I began digging for information and followed a lot of dead ends, until he discovered a database in Brittany, France, where most of our questions found answers. He has now pushed the record back to about the 15th century and created a fascinating picture of that branch of our family.

The details of a family tree are uncovered one small piece at a time. A birth record contains a date, a place and the name of a husband and wife. That leads to educated guesses about when and where a marriage occurred. A marriage record contains the names and residences of the parents on both sides, leading the search back farther into time. It's like assembling a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the picture on the box; each piece is a person who lived and labored and loved and left behind children to carry on the family name.

My relatives were laborers, farmers and fishermen. A few were tradesmen. They lived in times of war and times of peace, times of want and times of plenty. Their children sometimes died in infancy. Some put down roots, some moved from place to place looking for work. It can be easy to forget that the names recorded in a bureaucratic ledger are actually lives that were lived in the capricious realities of human experience, men and women who experienced the gamut of love and loss, blessing and tragedy.

There are many genealogies in the Bible, including an extensive one in the first chapters of the book of 1 Chronicles. The care with which the records of these ancient relations were kept reflects the Jews' sense of obligation to never forget the men and women who made their lives possible.

It's a good thing to live with a sense of gratitude to the past. I wonder if we moderns have carelessly forgotten some of that connection to our own past, and with it, a very humbling appreciation for those who made our lives possible by their own?

]]> Much of what we are and the opportunities we have had grew out of decisions made and actions taken by our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and on and on. I was born in America because several relatives chose to leave the countries of their birth and look here for a new start. I was raised with an appreciation for hard work because many of my relatives punched a time clock to earn a living. I had my introduction to Christianity through the Methodist church of my grandparents. My experience of family was formed through contact with the extended crowd of aunts and uncles and cousins on both sides of my family tree.

And since I was immersed from birth in an American, working class family that acknowledged the existence of the Christian God, I gained certain benefits, adopted certain values, took on a particular world view, and was presented with specific opportunities to develop my own gifts, to make my own place in the world.

I am not a self-made man. As John Donne correctly observes, none of us are islands. Not only is my DNA blended from a long genetic history going back centuries, but all that I am today has grown out of all that my ancestors were before me.

Besides suggesting an appreciation for the past, the other thing the Bible's genealogies are meant to show is that God's work in history occurs through the individual lives of generations of men and women, some of whom acknowledge him and some who do not. Their names are recorded to show that God himself knows every one of us, and is fully present in the moments of our lives whether we acknowledge him or not.

God accomplishes his work in the world through his people and remains faithful to them. Our names are etched into his heart. He knows us, walks with us and waits patiently for us when we wander away.

The Bible's genealogies show that God is mindful of individuals. It is a significant and beautiful characteristic of the Lord that he desires a relationship with us one by one. Yes, he established the nation of Israel. Yes, he brought salvation to the world and has called together his church. But it would be a mistake to conclude from these sweeping movements in history that God cares nothing for the individual. On the contrary, his view of history is the particular and personal view of one who knows and loves each individual man, woman and child, and wants to draw them to himself, one by one.

None of us are islands. Some of us may be archipelagos, a few might be peninsulas, most of us are a piece of the continent. We are unique individuals whom God knows intimately, by name, and we are loved unconditionally.

And because of the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, we have each been invited to have our family tree grafted into the Father's Tree of Life, where it will prosper forever under his care.

God in the details

2012-04-09T03:43:14Z

For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see His invisible qualities — His eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God. — Romans 1:20, NLT

If you spend enough time reading me here at AnotherThink, and the experience doesn't drive you around the bend, you'll discover that I have a particular style of expressing myself, a preference for certain words and figures of speech, and a tendency to formulate my thoughts in predictable ways. There is a certain inescapable Charlieness in everything I write, indeed, in everything I do.

Each of us have certain signature characteristics and quirks that make us unique. When the phone rings, you probably recognize the caller as a good friend by the unique qualities of her voice. When I visit an art museum, I know certain artists on sight by their style and the subjects they choose.

I was thinking about this while watching the movie Braveheart. There is a point in the musical score where a phrase resolves into a particular chord, and I immediately recognized it as something I had heard before in the movie Apollo 13. It was distinctive, and it seemed an unlikely coincidence. James Horner wrote the musical score for Apollo 13. As I listened more closely, I heard other familiar bits and pieces that convinced me that Horner had also written the music for Braveheart. A quick search on IMDB proved me right.

It wasn't that Horner was taking shortcuts; the music he wrote for those two films couldn't be more different. Every composer has his own musical vocabulary and grammar, and Horner simply made use of a style that is uniquely his and that revealed his identity as surely as if he had signed his name.

Like my writing, and like the brush strokes of an artist or the musical phrases chosen by a composer, I believe life itself is composed of signature elements that reveal the identity of its Creator.

There is life's exuberance, the way it fills every nook and cranny, from the macroscopic to the microscopic realms. The world is not merely alive, it is teeming with life, awash in life, thriving, bursting and overflowing with a an unstoppable flood of life, as if someone had tapped into a deep artesian well and uncorked a great sea. Such exuberance is remarkable given life's fragility, and all the more remarkable given the fact that in our neighborhood in the universe, there seems to be no other place where life flourishes with the wild abandon it shows here on Earth.

There is life's irrepressibility and dogged persistence, in which, despite a long history of climatic calamity and variability, of conflict between organisms and species, life has continually reorganized, rebooted as it were, adapted, persevered and endured.

]]> There is life's breathtaking elegance, the way complex systems are constructed of a few basic elements, which serve as the building blocks for a suite of proteins, which in turn join together so perfectly to form carefully-balanced systems that are durable, efficient, highly specialized and remarkably powerful.

There is life's extravagant and unnecessary beauty, including a palate of color that spans the entire visible spectrum, dazzling varieties of patterns and forms, many of which have been imitated in human art because of their pleasing symmetry, balance and proportion. Life flourishes in a sensual feast everywhere we turn.

Then, of course, there are those relational qualities that make us better than we might otherwise be. Love and self-sacrifice, the ability to step away from self-interest and act for the benefit of others, sometimes to our own detriment. Empathy and sympathy, qualities that encourage us to see life through the eyes of a stranger. Hope and duty, qualities that prompt us to think and act in ways that benefit the future. Commitment and honor, qualities that cause us to subordinate our personal needs and desires for priorities that benefit family and community.

All of these things can be explained, if not convincingly, as the natural consequences of a blind evolutionary process that has been at work, serendipitously, for millions of years here on our little planet, and is doubtless at work elsewhere in the universe. And that certainly is a possibility, though it would require the very longest of long-shots, making the recent Mega Million Lottery seem like a sure thing by comparison.

An infinitely more satisfying explanation, and one that I personally find easier to swallow, is that all of these qualities of life are like musical notes from the creative repertoire of the Creator God of the Bible.

As I encounter these various musical phrases and familiar melodies in the everyday experiences of living, I smile, pause and thank God for revealing himself through his creation. My Christianity leads me to expect to meet God in the daily minutiae of life, and when it happens it's a cause for joy, like spotting an old friend in a crowd.

Christianity is a relationship with — in fact a continual series of encounters with — the living God. At times we merely catch his shadow falling across the landscape or spot his footprints in the garden. Sometimes we are convinced that he is present with us. Faith invites us to live in the belief that we walk in God's world, and that he walks here, too.

What causes you to believe, or doubt, that God is present in the world?

Photo credit: T. Beth Kinsey, Wildlife of Hawaii

Grief interrupted

2012-04-04T15:25:49Z

As they led Jesus off, they made Simon, a man from Cyrene who happened to be coming in from the countryside, carry the cross behind Jesus. A huge crowd of people followed, along with women weeping and carrying on. At one point Jesus turned to the women and said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, don't cry for me. Cry for yourselves and for your children." — Luke 23:26-28 The Message

My mom lost her mother and her husband in three very sad weeks in 1961. I remember the family gathering at the old home in Baltimore, the subdued voices where normally there would be laughter and singing, the tears, the awkward silences hanging heavily over the room. There were whispered condolences and words intended to comfort, but no words could replace the one who was no longer there, no words could erase the terrible finality of death.

We understand Good Friday because we ourselves have experienced death and grief. Sometimes death comes as a blessed relief at the end of a long life and a difficult illness. Far too often it shocks and stuns us, robbing us of loved ones we were not yet ready to let go of. Good Friday is about the special and terrible sorrow of a parent witnessing the death of a child, the gut-wrenching loss of a friend who died too young, the rage of watching an innocent man executed for a crime he didn't commit.

In the aftermath of Jesus' crucifixion, after a friend and patron hastily placed his body in a family tomb, Jesus' disciples scattered to deal with their grief as men often do, in private isolation where their tears and anger wouldn't be seen. The women consoled each other and began making plans to properly clean and anoint Jesus' body for permanent rest after the Sabbath observances had finished.

Jerusalem was abuzz with talk as the thousands who had sought out this young rabbi and heard his remarkable teachings tried to fathom what it could mean that he had been sentenced to die the death of a common thief, publicly humiliated, mocked, spat upon, abandoned and rejected by so many who had followed and adored him just one week earlier.

In the Roman palaces, Pontius Pilate had already moved on, pleased to have rid himself of this Jesus, hopeful that by cutting off the head of his troublesome movement he had managed to quell a rebellion and buy himself a little peace in Jerusalem, this fevered land where you couldn't spit without hitting some holy man in prayer.

Night fell, but sorrow kept many from sleeping. Day broke in the quite of a city at Sabbath rest. The hours crept by in a blur. Men and women performed their Sabbath rituals by rote, their minds still wandering up to that terrible hilltop where Jesus had hung on a cross in agony and shame.

They were weary of death. They had buried spouses, children, parents, siblings, and friends. They had wept rivers of tears, with enough grief to overflow the walls of the great temple. And yet, death was unmoved. Death was the destroyer of fellowship, the killer of dreams, the heartless thief who crept in during the night and took away all that was most precious.

They knew death well, but they had never imagined that they would one day have to bury Jesus. He had been so full of God's power and glory, so full of light, surely, they had thought, the darkness of death would never touch this man. They had been wrong.

When that longest Sabbath had finally ended and dawn had broken, a group of women set off for the tomb. Numb with shock, reeling with despair, they trudged the long, quiet path carrying spices and ointments to prepare the body of the Good Shepherd for his permanent entombment. But their plans, and their grief, were interrupted:

[When they arrived at the tomb] they found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. So they went in, but they didn't find the body of the Lord Jesus. As they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes. The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground.

Then the men asked, "Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? He isn't here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what He told you back in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that He would rise again on the third day." Then they remembered that He had said this. So they rushed back from the tomb to tell His eleven disciples — and everyone else — what had happened. — Luke 24:2-9, NLT

Jesus appeared to his disciples over the following days and taught them many things that they had not understood before. Then he was raised up to Heaven, to live again eternally with his Father. By his death on that cross, Jesus Christ took away our guilt and reconciled all humanity to God.

But by his resurrection, Jesus vanquished the oldest of our enemies, death, and created a new and lasting promise, that for all who put their faith in Christ, death will not have the final word.

On that very first Easter morning, the Son of God broke free of his tomb and interrupted our grief with joy. Ever since that first Easter morning, death has been on the run.

Picture credit: Annibale Carracci, "Holy women at Christ's tomb," 1590.

A modest proposal to save Social Security, and America

2012-03-28T19:48:31Z

As you may have heard, Social Security is going broke. In 2010, the program ran a $49 billion deficit for the first time since 1983, and more red ink is expected when the 2011 figures are released. After that, things get worse. As the Social Security Trustees point out in their 2011 report:

After 2014, cash deficits are expected to grow rapidly as the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers. — See report here

The basic problem is that people are living longer and families are having fewer children, which means fewer new workers contributing to the growing crowd of retirees. In 1960, there were 5.1 full time workers for each Social Security recipient. By 2011, that number had fallen to 1.75. If that wasn't bad enough, the 2010 US census found that the number of children below the age of 18 in families with children is now 1.88, below the replacement rate.

One of the arguments made in support of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is that people with no insurance create financial burdens on the rest of us in the form of cost shifting. They can go to the emergency room where they must be treated for free, leaving us insured saps to pick up their costs.

So Congress has said that the fairest solution is to require every American to carry health insurance, forcing everyone to share the healthcare market costs equally.

It's an excellent principle, and one I believe can be used to shore up Social Security as well. The reason Social Security is going broke is: too many old people, not enough babies. We could solve the old people problem by putting arsenic in their bran muffins, but that wouldn't be a very enlightened solution. And, it might put Wilford Brimley on welfare.

Encouraging more babies would be nicer, and way more fun. Using the logic of the Affordable Care Act, Congress could decide that childless or under-reproducing couples are unfairly shifting the cost of their future Social Security benefits onto the rest of us. Under my proposed Affordable Retirement Act, Congress would require every American family to have at least 3 children, thus raising the number of future workers contributing to the system. Since this legislation would make Social Security solvent and promote more sex in America, I predict the ARA will be wildly popular with both parties.

Under my proposed legislation, singles or couples not wanting children could opt out of the 3-child minimum by paying a ~~tax~~ annual penalty of $5,000 per unborn child, thus carrying the financial load they refuse to lift through procreation.

And here's more good news: the ARA would dramatically stimulate the US housing market (as growing families sought bigger homes), the US health care industry, the world market for disposable diapers, and all manner of other child-related industries, creating an economic boom not seen since World War II.

My friends on Capitol Hill tell me that as soon as the Supreme Court approves Obamacare, they plan to get right to work on the Affordable Retirement Act. But why wait? Flush your birth control pills, give your spouse a wink and get started tonight on saving Social Security, and saving America.

Brake repair Odyssey

2012-03-27T04:42:10Z

You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. But first... you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. ... And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation. — Prophecy of the blind seer, from the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

After 18 years of service, the brake fluid reservoir in my truck cracked and started leaking. Since the ability to stop is considered by experts a necessary part of surviving the driving experience, I endeavored to make a repair.

I Googled up a replacement and figured this would be a quick and easy fix. But for some reason known only to the people at real-cheap-autoparts.com, you cannot buy a reservoir tank without buying the master brake cylinder it sits on. Yes, they are separate parts; no, you can't get them separately. I guess there isn't much profit in a 30 cent piece of plastic, but tack on a $40 piece of machined aluminum and you might be able to send the kids to college.

No problem. I figured the master cylinder was about due for replacement. But now, instead of a 5-minute job I was looking at a couple of hours of work. And I'd need to find an assistant to help me bleed the air out of the brake lines.

After 3 hours toiling in the sun, I finished the job without injury to myself or my truck. But it got me thinking about how often the thing we want to accomplish requires us to do a half-dozen things we would rather avoid. This principle can be expressed as follows:

For any desirable goal (x), there will be a number of obstacles standing in the way of that goal (y₁, y₂, y₃ ... y_n).

The achievement of anything of significance — whether it's losing 30 pounds or running a marathon or learning to speak French — requires a long and disciplined series of steps to get there. What keeps most of us from accomplishing big, hairy goals is not so much the size of the goal itself as the hard-slogging discipline needed to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way.

But frustrating as it is to have to deal with those inevitable obstacles, reaching your goal makes it all seem worthwhile. After my brake job I was greasy and dirty and splattered with brake fluid. But my truck was in much better shape than if I had simply replaced the reservoir. And, since I had never done this job on this particular model of truck before, I'd learned a few new tricks in the process. Success felt good.

The Apostle Peter makes a similar observation about faith.

On that day you will be glad, even if you have to go through many hard trials for a while. Your faith will be like gold that has been tested in a fire. And these trials will prove that your faith is worth much more than gold that can be destroyed. — 1 Peter 1:6-7, CEV

Faith, Peter says, is more precious than gold. And like gold, faith has to be refined in the furnace of hard knocks to burn away the impurities. The obstacles and challenges we run into may be unwelcome, but they serve a good purpose — God uses them to strengthen and refine our faith.

I don't wish to make light of the true hardships and pain that are so common in life. We are sometimes battered so hard that we wonder if we'll survive. It is no comfort at such times to be told that there might be some ultimate good just around the bend, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

But as Psalm 100:5 says, "The Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever, his faithfulness to all generations." Those facts are meant to be our foundation when faced with challenges. Life is hard, but God is good. The world can be faithless, but God is faithful. Life can be cruel, but God loves us steadfastly. The Lord, in other words, never changes in good times or bad, and never abandons us in the midst of hardship.

In your life there will be oh, so many startlements. Fear not the obstacles in your path, for God himself has vouchsafed your reward, and will use them to prove your faith.

Petroleum politics

2012-03-23T15:29:18Z

A new study by the Associated Press finds that during the past 36 years, US oil production increases did not correlate to lower US gasoline prices at the pump. When we produced more oil, the prices we paid for a gallon of gasoline did not drop. (see article here)

The dishonest spin put on this study is that drilling makes no difference: Oil is that rare, magical commodity not subject to the normal laws of supply and demand. As CBS and other news outlets put it:

It's the political cure-all for high gas prices: Drill here, drill now. But more U.S. drilling has not changed how deeply the gas pump drills into your wallet, math and history show.

That conclusion — drilling makes no difference — is meant to give cover to the Obama administration's active program to close off or sharply curtail US oil exploration and production on most federal lands, including off shore. As the President keeps saying, US oil production is up on his watch. What he hasn't said is that most of those increases have occurred on state and private lands where the Obama administration has been unable to block exploration.

But the AP study only tells part of the story.

Oil prices are in fact kept artificially high by the Saudis and other members of the oil producing states. They constantly adjust their outputs higher or lower to maximize the cost of a barrel of oil, something they are able to do because they control such a large percentage of the world supply. They operate exactly like the De Beers family does in controlling the prices of diamonds. Gem grade diamonds are not particularly rare, but retail prices are kept high because De Beers and its many confederates tightly control how many diamonds are on the market at any given time.

But if the US were to suddenly discover a wealth of gem grade diamonds here in this country, that discovery, and those diamonds once they were put on the market, would shift the balance of power. The same is true for oil.

As long as our government refuses to permit the vigorous development of US oil resources — and with new technologies that can extract oil from oil sands, oil shales and deep off shore wells, our theoretical share of the total world oil supply keeps increasing every day — the US has no power to shift world oil prices, except by reducing consumption. Developing our domestic oil supply would gradually shift the balance of power in what is now a very one-sided game.

What's needed is a national mandate to develop known US oil resources and to explore for more, a mandate that could not be held hostage to every political whim in Washington. Such a program would have a stabilizing effect on the world oil markets.

But more importantly, a serious program to develop our own oil resources would gradually reduce the amount of oil we purchase from the Gulf states, making us less dependent on their unstable regimes.

It is magical thinking to believe that we don't need oil. You might as well believe in unicorns and leprechauns. Oil has a higher energy density than every other modern power source, except for nuclear energy. (Which is why we are foolish to put so many obstacles in the way of nuclear power plants, a subject for another time.)

Anyone can see that this is true by comparing a 2012 Chevy Volt, which despite it's very expensive bank of batteries can only travel 40 miles on a charge, and my 1999 Mazda 4-cylinder gas powered beater, which routinely gets me 350 miles between fill ups. Oil is still the best choice for many modern energy needs, especially for transportation.

Someday, we may power our cars with hydrogen fuel cells. We need to keep developing wind power, solar power, geothermal power, and other inefficient, expensive technologies. These will all play a part in diversifying our energy portfolio, and diversification is a good thing. But let's not forget that despite billions of dollars of investment and huge government subsidies (which will be paid by our children), the US still only produces less than one-half of one percent of its energy needs from alternative sources.

These technologies may someday play a significant role in our energy supply, but that day is not today. And it is not tomorrow.

Today and tomorrow, we need oil, and lots of it. America is an industrial economy and most of us are not Luddites. Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, living communally in tents and sleeping bags, were unwilling to give up their smart phones and laptops, high speed internet and social networking. American life depends heavily on the use of technology, and the life blood of all technology is energy.

It is dangerous to continue to depend on Arab oil; it is woefully naïve to pretend that we can close off access to the rich and growing US supply of oil resources and continue to be an industrial and technological world leader.

Drilling for oil will not magically solve all of our energy challenges, but Washington's failure to get serious about developing US oil resources threatens to starve the US economy of the oxygen it needs to maintain our global technological leadership, and to build a robust economy that can support us, and our children.

Photo credit: Times-Picayune archive

Pursuing greatness

2012-03-16T22:13:28Z

I've always felt I was destined for some great achievement, what I don't know. — Gen. George S. Patton, from the film Patton

Ferdinand de Lesseps was a man who felt destined to accomplish great things. He was a visionary, a charismatic idealist whose unwavering self-confidence inspired those around him. When his friend, Said Pasha, Viceroy of Egypt, approached him in the mid-1850's looking for a grand project behind which to unite his country, de Lesseps proposed building a canal through the Isthmus of Suez, an achievement that would make Egypt the gateway between Europe and Asia.

Pasha was enthusiastic and granted de Lesseps, a Frenchman, the exclusive concession to build the canal. De Lesseps went to work immediately, forming his Suez Canal Company (Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez) and selling financial shares in the project to thousands of French investors large and small. He would build a sea level canal, unrestricted by locks or contrivances of any sort. De Lesseps hired the brightest French engineers to design and manage the project, and when the canal was finally opened in 1869, Ferdinand de Lesseps returned to France a national hero.

De Lesseps had just turned 64 and was not the sort to rest on his laurels. He began looking for a second act and found it, ten years later, in Central America, a place where he hoped to repeat his previous success by excavating a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, thus joining the Atlantic and the Pacific. De Lesseps' Panama Canal would be modeled on what he had done at Suez — it would be a sea level canal without artificial locks. Simplicity and elegance demanded it be so.

De Lesseps was incapable of self-doubt and confident that no problem existed which could not be solved by human ingenuity. It was the beginning of the industrial age; everywhere nature was yielding up its secrets. A way would be found, whatever the challenges. With de Lesseps at the head of this great project, all of France was certain of success.

But Ferdinand de Lesseps was not an engineer, and Panama was not the Suez. The Isthmus of Suez had been relatively flat; Panama was folded by immense, rocky hills. Suez had been sandy and barren; Panama was a dense tropical jungle slashed by a raging river that could rise more than 40 feet in the rainy season. In Egypt there had been an abundance of cheap labor; Panama had no labor force whatsoever — everything, including manpower, had to be imported.

There was one more challenge in Panama that de Lesseps had never faced in the Suez: disease. The jungles and swamps of Panama were perfect breeding grounds for malaria, yellow fever and typhoid, not to mention all manner of venomous snakes and insects.

In the late 1800's, no one understood the role of mosquitoes in the transmission of disease, and while the French brought their best doctors to Panama, they did nothing to attack the mosquito problem. Workers began dying at alarming rates. Young, healthy French engineers would land in Panama full of enthusiasm and excitement, only to die within weeks. Malaria and yellow fever ravaged the entire workforce, young and old, male and female, black and white.

"[E]very prior estimate of the size of the task had been woefully inaccurate," writes David McCullough in a carefully researched history The Path Between the Seas: The creation of the Panama Canal.

Even ignoring the tens of thousands of deaths from illness, a sea level canal was simply impossible in the rugged Isthmus of Panama. De Lesseps had always insisted that a way would be found, but the project had been dogged from the beginning by engineering setbacks, disasters, deadline slippages and monumental cost overruns. When the investors finally refused to provide more money, The Panama Canal Company collapsed and Ferdinand de Lesseps' reputation was ruined.

]]> To most Frenchmen, Ferdinand de Lesseps was a great man whose success at Suez made him too big to fail, a belief that de Lesseps himself seems to have shared.

What constitutes greatness? In politics, we think immediately of Lincoln skillfully wielding power to hold the country together, or Madison conceiving of a new liberal approach to government that would provide unheard of freedom for citizens. In science, we remember Newton conceiving of a new branch of mathematics or Einstein imagining how light behaves. We tend to associate greatness with power or insight or the achievement of the impossible.

Jesus saw greatness in terms of how we treat others:

Jesus called them together and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave — just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." — Matthew 20:25-28, NIV

Greatness, in Jesus' thinking, is not about wielding power but laying it aside. Greatness puts its focus on people rather than some great cause. Jesus pointed to their Roman rulers, men who made themselves great by forcing their subjects into harsh service to the needs of the state.

The search for greatness through power remains the primary motivator of most of the world's despots. It is also the same thing that motivates many of the leaders of the world's enlightened democratic states, who enter "public service" hoping to remold society according to their political preferences, wielding the power of the enlightened and benevolent state like a bludgeon.

But in all that he taught and lived, Jesus repudiated that path to greatness and modeled instead a greatness rooted in humility and servanthood, a life focused on compassionate engagement with people in their very human and ordinary needs and pains. Jesus' raison d'être was to become for each individual his or her invitation to a restoration of their broken relationship with God.

Like Patton, I have sometimes felt that I should be accomplishing some great thing. Like Ferdinand de Lesseps, I have sometimes been driven by an inner need to carve my name in history. These days, lots of us are looking for a chance at fame and recognition, and TV shows like American Idol and The Voice feed the belief that we all deserve the trappings of greatness.

And then there was Jesus, who only sought to be great in the eyes of his Father, and who achieved greatness by healing the sick, comforting the hurting, bringing hope and joy to the suffering, and laying down his life for us all.

Photo credit: Charlie Lehardy, November, 2006.

60 is the new 40

2012-02-24T19:21:01Z

The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair. — Proverbs 20:29, English Standard Version

60 is the new 40. — an anonymous, delusional Baby Boomer

Tomorrow I will turn sixty, and I'm not particularly thrilled about it. You can concoct a convincing enough denial of the realities of aging when you turn 40 or even 50 (at least until one of your smiling children reminds you that 50 is a half century!), but there's just no way around the fact that 60 is old. Your humble correspondent has become ancient, hoary, doddering, decrepit, a member of the geriatric set.

At 60, one has reached the age where the only young women to give you a second look turn out to be grad students in paleontology. You've reached the age where well-meaning friends describe you as spry, a word only ever heard in the Senior Olympics.

Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne of England just a couple of weeks before I was born, and just a few weeks later, as mom and dad were getting the hang of late night diaper changes, Humphrey Bogart won an Academy Award for African Queen. Harry Truman was in his final year as President of the US, and the wounds of World War 2 were still tender and painful.

Technology was beginning to show its promise. TV had 3 channels to choose from! My grandfather and I would often watch Gunsmoke on his small black and white set in the evenings — he smoked a pipe as we watched, and I grew up loving the smell of pipe tobacco. Radios had shrunk from tabletop to pocket size thanks to the invention of the transistor and ingenious Japanese post-war manufacturing.

Cinema was the big family entertainment option, and the motion picture industry was booming. If an interesting new film came to the local movie house, you went to see it right away because it would be replaced in two weeks by something even newer, and once it was gone, it was gone for good. No DVDs, no VCRs.

Most homes had one, black telephone, rented from the phone company. You could dial O for the operator and talk to a cheerful human being who would tell you the exact time of day if you needed to set your clock. Phone numbers all had named exchanges, like TErrace-8, GRanite-4, or as in the title of the famous Glenn Miller song, PEnnsylvania 6-5000.

In elementary school we didn't learn about stranger danger, we learned to duck and cover in the event of a nuclear attack. Everyone was worried that the Russians would fire their missiles at America, so the federal government printed helpful plans for building your very own fallout shelter in the basement; I had several neighbors who built them and stocked them with food, just in case.

I collected baseball cards from packs of Topps bubblegum and traded them with friends. The ones we didn't need we clipped against the spokes of our bikes to make them sound like motorcycles. I was giddy about outer space and would eagerly read every word of Life magazine's behind-the-scenes coverage of the space program. The first launches were broadcast live on all three networks.

My grandparents never owned a car. My grandmother called them "machines," as in "I don't trust those machines." In Baltimore at that time you could get where you wanted to go on the "street car," an electric trolley that rumbled on rails down the city streets. I remember trying to sit in the back one time and being told that the front was for whites, the back for coloreds.

Our extended family all lived nearby, so we paid frequent visits to uncles and aunts, cousins and other relatives. Holidays meant huge gatherings of people around a banquet of homemade food. My aunt would often play the tinny, upright piano and we would all sing along with whatever was appropriate to the season. The men would tell funny stories on each other while we kids tried to remain respectfully quiet in the background.

]]> My Uncle Ted was an amateur Civil War historian. Whenever we visited his home, he would take me downstairs where he had glass display cases filled with guns, swords, Minié balls, uniforms, letters, hundreds of objects that he had collected and carefully labeled. He could tell you the moment by moment troop movements of any of the North-South engagements and exactly where things had gone right or wrong. From Uncle Ted I got my love of history.

My Uncle Bill had a farm where he taught me to collect eggs in the hen house, to pick blackberries, to gather honey, and to drive a tractor. From Uncle Bill I learned the deep satisfaction that comes from working hard and seeing your labors bear fruit.

My Uncle Pete was a telephone company electrician who loved tinkering with model railroads. I've written about him here. Pete supplied me with boxes of switches, relays, rectifiers and transformers so that I could create my own running train layouts. He and I would sketch out track and control designs together, and when he visited he always wanted to see my latest projects. From Uncle Pete I developed a fascination with electronic and mechanical systems, which has been the basis of my career as a computer tech.

As families have moved farther and farther apart, our children have fewer opportunities to build those sorts of bonds with their relatives. I spent a lot of time with older adults growing up, and I quickly learned that they were full of fascinating stories and remarkable information about the world, things they were only too happy to share if I merely asked the right questions.

When Proverbs says "the splendor of old men is their grey hair," it's referring to the wisdom of a long life lived well and the experiences gained in that life. Not all of us old folks are necessarily wise, of course, but we have survived, we have come from a different time in history, we have witnessed and experienced things that have given us unique perspectives about human nature, and the nature of God and his creation. We have disconnected the generations, and in doing so we have robbed both young and old of the benefits of learning from each other. That's too bad.

There is a certain psychic shock that comes from turning sixty. Though I have kept my boyish charm and good looks, my hair is greying, I don't see as well as I used to, and I don't have the stamina that I once did. But to tell you the truth, deep inside I don't feel much different than I did when I was 20. I still find God's creation fascinating and beautiful, I still find the world to be full of delightful surprises, and I still see life as a precious and wonderful gift, an opportunity to enjoy God's blessings and to discover more about this God who created me, loves me, and has redeemed me through his son, Jesus.

Tomorrow I'm turning 60, and I feel blessed.

Photo credit: Rembrandt van Rijn self-portrait, 1660, at the age of 54.

Free Big Macs for all!

2012-02-17T19:10:31Z

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. — First amendment to the US Constitution

If America is exceptional, among the chief reasons are these five freedoms. We were founded by people seeking to escape the oppressive hand of government intervention into matters of faith. When their descendants met to compose our Bill of Rights, they naturally placed the autonomy of religious institutions and freedom of religious thought and practice at the top of the list.

Secularists often fail to understand that religious faith is holistic. True faith cannot lock itself away behind the doors of a temple, a synagogue, a cathedral, a church or a meeting house. True faith is no more able to retreat into the heart than a blade of grass, once it bursts from seed, is able to remain hidden beneath the soil. True faith seeks expression in word and deed. It shapes values and worldviews. It guides desires. It directs our footsteps as we walk and work in the world, even as we live among those who don't share this faith.

True faith is a first principle from which we are led to a proper understanding of what is true, what is right, what is good, what is moral, what is just. As such, true faith forms the very DNA of a moral society, and in shaping our cultural DNA, true faith shapes society itself.

Therefore, it is woefully ignorant to suppose, as many in the media do, that the recent blowup about contraceptives and abortifacients in health insurance is just another example of the perpetual political struggle between left and right.

Politics is merely the how of this debate. The what of this debate is this: Are we going to take the First Amendment seriously or aren't we? And if the answer is yes, religious faith will always create real world limits to political power, and political policy.

The HHS mandate and all of its clones will crush the moral values of religious people by forcing them to give full financial support to things they believe to be sinful.

The moral calculus here is pretty simple. If we can force Catholics to buy our condoms, can we make vegans buy our Big Macs? Can we make PETA finance Eskimo seal hunting expeditions? Can I get a bunch of climate scientists to buy me a GM Hummer H3?

All of these positions of conscience we instinctively grant each individual to hold or reject as he pleases, yet none of them have the status of the First Amendment protections afforded to religious establishments and religious expression. If positions of religious conscience can be overturned by government fiat, exactly which positions of conscience are safe?

]]> The Obama administration was soundly rebuked in a 9-0 Supreme Court decision concerning an attempt by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to block a religious school from removing a teacher. President Obama's own court appointee, Justice Elena Kagan, eloquently defended the constitutional autonomy granted people of faith and faith-based institutions in her concurring opinion:

...it is easy to forget that the autonomy of religious groups, both here in the United States and abroad, has often served as a shield against oppressive civil laws. To safeguard this crucial autonomy, we have long recognized that the Religion Clauses protect a private sphere within which religious bodies are free to govern themselves in accordance with their own beliefs. The Constitution guarantees religious bodies "independence from secular control or manipulation"... — From the concurring opinions of Justices Alito and Kagan, in the unanimous Supreme Court decision of HOSANNA-TABOR EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH AND SCHOOL v. EEOC (2012)

Since our highest modern value is to have absolute control over our bodies and destinies, medical science has met the challenge by providing a shopping cart full of technologies aimed at disconnecting sexual intercourse from its most obvious (and many would say odious) natural consequence — pregnancy.

Disconnecting sex from child bearing has led rapidly and inevitably to disconnecting sexual intercourse from marriage, or for that matter, from any meaningful commitment whatsoever (as perfectly illustrated in Carrie Underwood's country song I don't even know his last name). Anti-pregnancy technologies make it possible for anyone beyond the age of puberty to experience all the very best in meaningless, non-procreative, risk-free recreational sex.

Thanks to the new HHS insurance mandate, all of those technologies will be available to any 13-year-old under her family insurance policy without charge, paid in full by a generous cadre of priests, rabbis, ministers, nuns — paid for by all of us, in fact.

Welcome to the United States of Europe, where only the tourists visit the cathedrals. That, in any case, may be the fond hope of the secularists who are pushing this new mandate.

If the First Amendment still allows me freedom to exercise my religious beliefs and freedom from government arm-twisting to make me violate them, then the Department of Health and Human Services cannot compel me to pay for Paris Hilton's birth control pills. It's just that simple.

Deep blindness

2012-02-12T16:08:24Z

John Hull began losing his eyesight at the age of thirteen when he developed cataracts. By the time he was seventeen he was blind in his left eye. Vision in his right remained adequate until his mid-thirties, when it, too, began deteriorating, necessitating thicker and thicker corrective lenses to carry out his duties as a professor of religious education. In his 48th year, he lost all sight.

Having grown up seeing, Hull retained the images of faces, objects and scenes in his memory, as you might expect; but it wasn't long until he began losing these memories, too. Eventually, he forgot what seeing had been all about, an experience he calls "deep blindness." His other senses, in particular his hearing, seemed to have crowded out his now useless abilities of visualization. As he grew more adept at "seeing" the world in a very non-visual way, he lost all that he had formerly experienced through his eyes.

John Hull's experiences are one of many cited by the neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book "The Mind's Eye," in which he examines what it means to have sight and how vision influences our experiences. I've been a fan of Oliver Sacks for many years because of his ability to explain in plain language some of the remarkable complexities of the mind and how it shapes — and sometimes distorts — the realities of the world we live in.

John Hull's experience of deep blindness serves as a sad but apt metaphor for the deep spiritual blindness of the world we live in. Those of us who live our lives in the context of our faith in the reality of a personal and eternal God, who experience constant spiritual fellowship with his Son, Jesus, the Galilean rabbi of the New Testament, who practice conversational prayer and meditation and enjoy communal experiences of worship with other believers — those of us who call ourselves Christians see vivid and convincing evidence of God's presence and activity all around us.

Meanwhile, walking beside us, witnessing the very same wonders, there are others who live in deep blindness, failing to see God at work anywhere. They have become so convinced that we are adrift and alone that many have actually forgotten who God is and have constructed in their minds a perfect, alternate reality where God is neither necessary nor wanted.

Case in point: The recent Health and Human Services ruling that would force everyone, even those with deeply held moral beliefs to the contrary, to finance free contraceptives and abortifacients to all. In a letter signed by former Vatican Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon and other notables, this decision is called "morally obtuse" and an "assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience" of men and women of faith.

It is clear evidence that the White House and its chief policymakers are stumbling about in a deep moral and spiritual blindness, at best completely clueless to the moral concerns of people of faith, at worst completely antagonistic towards those concerns and the people who cherish them.

Blind to the strenuous opposition that would rise up against the HHS ruling, the White House on Friday was forced to come up with an "accommodation" in which insurance companies would be forced to reach into their own pockets and pay for contraceptives for us, a plan that displays such a staggering naiveté about how business works that it seems unnecessary to point out that changes absolutely nothing.

The Left has been on a crusade for decades to push businesses to clean up their associations so that, when we buy their products, we are not secretly providing financial support for dictators, sweat shops, slave labor, destroyers of the environment and a host of other concerns. Why? Because we understand that by purchasing a product, we may be financing all sorts of morally repugnant practices.

If we have a moral duty to only buy products and services from "green" companies, and that is the modern claim, those of us who believe in the sanctity of life at all stages of development have a similar duty not to buy insurance when our premiums will also purchase abortifacients, contraceptives and sterilizations. Under the new HHS regulations, it will be illegal for any of us to refuse to pay those premiums. We will be coerced by government rule to cooperate in an immoral scheme.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the aim of those who are driving the HHS policy. It is a policy designed to set Americans free from burdensome religious, moral and financial limits to our sexuality, to permit us to freely and recreationally copulate whenever and with whomever we choose, unworried by the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy.

Inconveniently, the church still insists that human sexuality was designed by God to be freely enjoyed only in the context of marriage, where it can be enjoyed in an atmosphere of love, trust and commitment, and where it can be appropriately procreative. The sexual libertines driving the HHS policy in the Obama White House are deeply blind to the wisdom of what Judaism and Christianity teach about sexually, and are committed to ending all barriers to absolute sexual freedom, by force of law, if necessary.

The Obama administration's original policy and this new, so-called accommodation, are deeply offensive to many men and women of faith. It crosses a constitutional line in which is forces men and women to violate their religious beliefs in order to cooperate in the advancement of a brave new sexuality that is morally reckless, since it divorces human sexuality from the God who created it.

There can be no accommodation in this matter because no compromise is possible that respects the religious beliefs of Christians. If the first amendment's guarantee of the free exercise of religion has any meaning at all, the HHS policy must be rescinded.

Update: The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has posted a PDF of the letter referenced above, and is updating it as additional people ask to have their names added as signers. You can see the latest here.

Living in gratitude

2012-01-16T05:09:23Z

Since God chose you to be the holy people He loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other's faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others.

Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony. And let the peace that comes from Christ rule in your hearts. For as members of one body you are called to live in peace. And always be thankful. — Colossians 3:12-15, NLT

I guess I've never taken New Year's resolutions seriously. I'm sure they work for some people. I'll bet Warren Buffet is the man he is today because one New Year's Eve, while wearing a silly party hat and listening to Guy Lombardo, he resolved to become a gazillionaire before he was 50.

But if you're like me, you've already forgotten whatever you resolved back on January 1, and now you're back sweating in the company salt mines. They didn't move you into a bigger cubicle over the holidays, your inbox is filling up, the phone is ringing off the hook, customers are knocking at the door, and February is just around the corner. Life sure moves fast, doesn't it?

Life moves fast and change comes hard. Routines and habits, both good and bad, make up the daily rhythm of our lives, and it's rare when we manage to swim out of those deep currents and push off in a new direction.

For me, change comes hard because I resist it. I'm generally content with the status quo. If I had my druthers, I think I would probably just drift with the winds.

Unfortunate as it is for my driftwood personality, I believe in a personal, indwelling God and I've invited him to rule over my life. Not rule over in the sense that I'm some beeping, herky-jerky droid slavishly following the demands of my programming — Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi; you're my only hope!

God created me, he is the author of all creation and, therefore, knows a thing or two about what makes me tick, what I need to thrive, what things are healthy and which are deleterious.

So I don't drift through life, as appealing as that may sound. But neither do I make resolutions. Instead, at the suggestion of a pastor long ago, I ask God to help me find a theme for the year, a theme that can be summed up in a single word — my word for the year. Then I invite God to help me live out the meaning of that word all year long in every area of my life.

In his challenge in Colossians 3, Paul seems to be saying something like this:

"Each morning, as you dress for your day's work, put on these clothes as well: mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience and forgiveness. And to complete your outfit perfectly, put on the jacket of love, for love is the fabric the entire ensemble is sewn from. And let Christ's peace rule in your hearts."

I read those words and wince, because I don't live them consistently. None of us do.

But my eyes drifted past all of those virtues and settled on a flashing red light at the end of Paul's challenge, an apparent afterthought: "And always be thankful."

Acknowledge God's favor and goodness. Live in gratitude.

My theme for this year is gratitude, because I've come to realize that I'm not very good at being thankful. Not that I'm a complainer, at least not outwardly. But inwardly, in my conversations with God, too many of my prayers are complaints about things I'm unhappy about.

]]> There are plenty of examples of prayers of complaint in the Bible, which has led Christians over the centuries to say that God wants our prayers to be honest and unvarnished. There's nothing wrong with complaining to God, per se. The problem is one of balance, of acknowledging and staying anchored in the bigger realities. My particular circumstances at any moment may be tragic, but God remains good, fair, just, kind, generous, merciful, full of grace and love for his creation — for you and me.

My complaints, when I make them, should never take center stage. They have to be made in the context of God's generous and lavish blessings to me. My life, as I live it, cannot rightly revolve around my complaints. If I go through life moaning and groaning like Winnie-the-Pooh's pessimistic friend Eeyore, I am saying by my actions and attitudes that God's many mercies are meaningless or unimpressive.

Living in gratitude is probably second nature for some people, but for me it's a conscious choice made throughout the day, just as I might choose to respond to the slings and arrows of life with mercy, kindness, humility, etc.

In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy. — Henri J M Nouwen

It has occurred to me that if I cultivate a more consistent response of gratitude, I will likely come to experience a greater sense of contentment, as well. Perhaps this is precisely what God intends. If we surrender ourselves to God's sovereignty, if we believe that God is good, if we view our lives as a gift of God's love, then we can experience God's peace in the midst of hardship, grief, pain and uncertainty.

Paul's seeming throwaway challenge to "always be thankful" may be one of the most difficult attitudes to live out, given the realities of life's hardships. Henri Nouwen is surely right that gratitude is a discipline that needs careful cultivating. And yet, by living in gratitude, we give back to God the worship he is rightly due for all the blessings he has given us in Christ.

If you were to choose a theme for 2012, what would it be?

Photo credit: Muharrem Oner, iStockphoto.com

In search of peace

2012-01-08T07:52:47Z

It was a brisk, cloudless, January morning, a perfect day to be out and about. I was working in the yard and considering a trip to the Home Depot. At a shopping center a few miles to the south, several dozen people were queuing up outside of a grocery store to speak with their congressional representative. A little girl with an interest in politics had eagerly come along with her neighbor. A federal judge had dropped by to congratulate the congresswoman on her recent re-election. Several folks arrived seeking help dealing with government agencies.

A man in a hurry pushed his way through the line and around the folding table where the congresswoman was getting organized with her staff. He pulled out a gun and opened fire, then turned and continued shooting into the crowds gathered nearby. Gripped by a terrible psychosis, he emptied a 30-round clip and stopped to reload. A wounded woman batted the second clip out of his hand, giving others the moment they needed to tackle and hold him until the police could arrive.

The gunman had managed to shoot 19 people, killing 6. He gravely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, intending to kill her, miraculously failing. In his demented anger he wounded and murdered indiscriminately; the dead included a 79-year-old grandmother and the 9-year-old political science enthusiast.

Gabrielle Giffords had won a tough re-election battle and was looking forward to another term serving the interests of the Democratic party and her southern Arizona constituents. She loved meeting with people, listening to their concerns, and doing what she could to solve their problems. She loved politics, and seemed destined for a long and successful career in Washington, D.C.

Today, the once fluent public speaker finds conversation difficult. The bullet went through the left side of her brain, shattering the speech processing areas. She is having to learn from scratch how to verbalize her thoughts. If she is able to continue her career in public service, and that appears doubtful, she will struggle mightily with the very part of the job that came so easily to her before: interacting with constituents about the issues affecting their lives.

A deranged man turned a peaceful community gathering into a scene of horror. Neither the victims nor the authorities had any clue what they would be facing until the bullets started flying, and by then, of course, it was too late. The alleged killer had flown under the radar of anyone who might have helped him until it was too late.

Our lives take the most unpredictable twists and turns. We lull ourselves into believing that we have everything figured out, everything under control — and then we're blindsided by something we never saw coming.

Jesus had something interesting to say to his disciples when he was hours away from being arrested and crucified, an event that none of them saw coming, either. He spoke of peace, and troubles:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. — John 14:27, NIV

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. — John 16:33, NIV

It's the sort of statement that might sound arrogant, even insane, coming from anyone else. Perhaps it really does sound a bit insane as you read these words, especially if you've recently had your life turned upside down by some unexpected tragedy or grief.

At such times, Jesus claims to be able to restore our peace. At such times, Jesus claims to be the very source of the peace we desperately long for and need.

He never promises to keep sorrows and troubles away from our doors, but he assures us that we can find peace, in him.

Today, Tucson will remember that awful day with the ringing of bells at 10:11am, the moment the first shots rang out one year ago. A community deeply hurt struggles to find peace, and to find appropriate ways of honoring the dead, the wounded, and the multitudes who are still grieving. We've gathered for speeches, for memorial services, for hikes, and soon the city will erupt in the sound of bells.

Where does peace come from at such times?

When life turns upside down, may we remember the life and words of the Prince of Peace and experience the reality of his presence, his comfort, and his peace.

Photo credit: James Palka, Associated Press

Doing a lot with a little

2011-11-21T04:25:12Z

Stone, brick and concrete: In southern Mexico, where wood and steel are costly, homes and offices are built with materials from the earth. The oldest buildings are constructed of quarried stone, traditionally a green-tinted limestone, or sun-baked coffee-colored adobe bricks. These were used to construct massive walls, often a meter thick, which not only supported the addition of upper stories, but kept the interior living spaces cool during the heat of the day.

Now, with greater awareness of how earthquakes work in this volcanic region, more modern buildings are constructed with a reinforced concrete framework that is filled in with kiln-fired brick or concrete block. But whatever the techniques used, these materials are cold and heavy and might have created an urban landscape that looks dreary and industrial.

Mexicans love beauty, music, art and celebration, and these values are reflected in a hundred creative ways in their homes and offices. They have discovered ways to make these cold materials express joy.

I took a walk through the Oaxaca Zocalo and surrounding streets, paying special attention to the buildings. You won't find a single structure in Oaxaca that looks like another; whereas Americans seem to prefer living in cookie-cutter communities ruled by iron-fisted boards who live to enforce blandness and conformity, Mexicans let their creativity run free.

Here is a simple home that has been converted into a business office for a company called Spectra. The windows and doors protrude slightly from the surface of the exterior wall to give 3-dimensional interest to what might otherwise have been a flat, unbroken surface. Cornices have been constructed over the arched wall openings, with a duplicate coping detail running the length of the parapet wall at the roof line. Contrasting colors are used like this in many Oaxaca buildings to draw the eye to these decorative elements. Even the wrought iron grill work, so commonly used for security, is full of curves and arcs meant to distract your attention from its primary quality — strength.

The materials beneath the surface are probably ordinary brick and stone, but with the use of decorative concrete castings and an appealing paint scheme, these cold construction materials have been given warmth and beauty. Mexicans are masters at transforming their cities into places that are appealing to the eyes.

The Guapinol store (guapinol is a very tall and massive evergreen tree) is a squat but massive building constructed of huge limestone blocks, requiring very deep door and window penetrations, as well as heavy lintels over the doors. The stone has been plastered over and the windows and roof line have been enhanced by some modest cast cornices and copings. Here, however, the owners have added interest by stripping away portions of the exterior plaster to show off the original stone and brick underneath. The stone work along the entire parapet is also exposed, which ties it to the exposed stone at the building's corner and along the base of the walls. Pleasing colors brighten the building and frame the doorways, but what really sets this building apart are the contrasts in texture between the smooth, unbroken surface of the plastered wall and the irregular joints of the exposed stonework.

Many of the buildings in Oaxaca date back to the time of the Spanish colonial expansion of the 16th century. Though they have been modernized in various ways, they have been proudly preserved as much as possible and re-purposed in creative ways.

The Hotel Posada del Virrey is a beautiful example of what can be done with a bit of imagination. On the lower levels, massive limestone arches frame the entryways. The main doorway is framed by two decorative fluted columns which seem to support the balcony above it. That balcony, which likely serves the hotel's best suite, has been framed with exposed stone that has been simply but masterfully carved and topped by a curved stone crest at the roof line. Fine craftsmanship has transformed a plain structure into a gem.

One of the things I appreciate about Oaxaca, besides the beauty that you find down every street, is how much they have done with so little. It's a good lesson. You don't have to spend lavishly to make something beautiful out of something plain. A few architectural details, some careful paint choices, and relatively plain buildings suddenly develop character and charm.

The other thing that I appreciate is the respect for history that is so evident in the preservation and re-purposing of their old buildings and parks. I watched a movie production company rehearsing a sword fight in a street beside one of the cathedrals the other day. Under the shade of a massive, centuries-old tree, in the shadow of a 16th century church, all they had to do was spread some dirt over the asphalt street to be instantly transported back in time hundreds of years.

Oaxaca is a fascinating place full of history, culture, art, beauty and tradition. If you've never been here, you're missing something special.