Stuck Like Congress, or Stuck in Philly With a Wandering Mind
Larry, Moe, and Curly
Here I am, stuck in Philadelphia…literally. Another Nor’Easter has blown in with a vengeance, and I am a shut-in at the Homestead Suites.
Stuck. One might see the way recent weather has brought much of the Northeast, including Washington DC, to a grinding halt as a metaphor for our government. So many decry the gridlock, the inability to get anything done, the lack of a consensus as such a terrible, awful thing.
I don’t. I rather appreciate the fact that there is more than one side of the aisle in the American government. I am glad there are divergent opinions, incessant argumentation, varying philosophies on how things ought to be—and how they ought to be done. Why should our government be in harmony on issues about which Americans are not in harmony? Do they not represent us? Is that not what we sent them to Capitol Hill to do?
If you want government that is in lock-step, in one accord, in unison, like a well-oiled machine with a singular focus, you might move to Iran or North Korea. There seems to be little argument inside the hallowed halls of those regimes…and woe be to the ones who would argue outside them.
Stuck. A seven-and-one-half hour summit on health care only served to show how far apart the Republicans and Democrats are on health care reform. The conservatives won’t jump on the let’s-make-Uncle-Sam bigger than ever bandwagon and sign off on Obama Care, and the Democrats won’t be told no, public opinion be damned.
Nancy Pelosi says, “Some Americans don’t have time for us to start over.”
Pelosi, the House leader and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader both advocate ramming the health care bill through by using the nifty reconciliation maneuver they used to whine about when they were in the minority.
Time is of the essence. We must act now. No time to waste.
When you get a sales call and the person on the other end of the line is telling you there is no time to think about it, this is a limited time offer, you must act right this very minute or be forever lost, what do you do? I hang up the phone…unless they tick me off, then I use a few choice words, tell them never to call me again, and then hang up the phone. (And my choice of choice words is none of your business.)
This is how the multi-billion dollar bailout was added to the taxpayer’s tab. And this is how Reid and Pelosi, snake oil salesmen that they are, want to add a few thousand people to your insurance premium. (Not to mention making you an outlaw if you don’t have insurance coverage.)
Stuck. That is what we are. Stuck with Barrack Obama for a couple more years. Stuck with a likely one-term president who, when he sees the writing on the wall, will have an even more pronounced scorched-earth approach than he currently does. Then, we will be stuck with big-government laws and policies that will take an act of congress to undo, which means we may just be…
Stuck…
I am. Somewhere between Philly and the cheese steak I am craving.
Sarah Palin and the Advancement of Political Correctness and Gotcha Politics
Say it isn’t so, Sarah. Please tell me you are not turning the Political Correctness cannon on the party that created it. I know that Rahm Emanuel’s use of the term “f—ing retarded” was insensitive, calloused, and hurtful to many, but was it really worth calling for his job? Must we continue to play this never-ending game of “Gotcha”?
Before any of my readers— especially any with disabled children— get up in arms, let me clarify and qualify my stance here. I am not saying the word “retarded” is not a hurtful word to many. I am not saying that its careless use shouldn’t be culled from our every day language. I am simply saying that the man did not mean anything by it when he said it. He didn’t mean to offend the disabled or the people who love them.
He meant, in fact, to point out that some of the very people who helped elect Obama— namely, the extreme left— were thinking of running attack ads against the moderate members of their own party, and that was “not a very good idea.” He simply chose to use a little stronger, more unfortunate, wording.
I, too, am the parent of a disabled person. (I cannot say “disabled child,” because she sometimes reads this and she will call for me to be fired if I do.) Through the years, I have watched the evolution of the proper treatment of the disabled. It has been slow and painful, but significant strides have been made.
My daughter might be surprised to know that when she was very young and needed a surgery that cost in excess of $150,000, the bulk of the tab was picked up by a state service called California Crippled Children’s Services. I doubt they still call the agency that, if it still exists. The term “crippled” has such negative connotations and is no longer apropos.
There are not many benefits of being disabled (I use this word “disabled” cautiously, because it is probably nearing its end too), but one of them is prime parking space. For that, we used to have a “Handicap Sticker” and park in “handicap” spots. But we cannot do that anymore, because the word “handicap” is now only acceptable in places like Las Vegas, where they handicap horse races, boxing matches, and such.
Back to the subject at hand. For the record, I am no fan of Rahm Emanuel. Most who know me know how I feel about the Obama administration in general. I just don’t think an insensitive remark made in the context of calling out his party’s own constituents is worth an opponent calling for his head on a platter. Go ahead and say how you feel about what he said, why you were offended by it, why it hurts people you care about. Just don’t use it to your political advantage or as a reason to send him to the unemployment line.
Perhaps I feel the way I do because I am who I am. When I was a kid, a good many of the whuppings I got were in response to what my Mom termed my “smart mouth.” I tended to think of things to say and say them without thinking them all the way through first. Consequently, I often offended the sensibilities of adults who thought it best if punk kids like me were seen and not heard.
Not much has changed over the years. You know, every family has that uncle who comes to the Christmas dinner and the whole family holds its collective breath every time he opens his chops to speak. What will he say now? Who will he offend? Well…I am that uncle. A former friend once told me that I had no filter between my brain and tongue.
I think maybe that no-filter thing is part of the reason he is a former friend.
At any rate, I think Sarah Palin, if she has presidential aspirations, missed a golden opportunity to appear presidential. She could have admonished Rahm Emanuel, but admitted that we are all prone to being insensitive and unthinking at times and this should be a lesson and reminder to us all. She could have taken the high road. She could have resisted the easy target.
But she didn’t.She took careful aim and fired a shot right at the man’s head…just like a Democrat will do to her the next time she says something that can in any way be taken as an offense to someone.
Okay, I am getting those looks from the family again. Time for me to be seen and not heard. I apologize to all I have offended by not being sufficiently offended by stupid remarks from a political hack.
(Sorry to all the parents of stupid kids for using the word “stupid” in that last sentence.)
Worship is More than Good Packaging
A week or so ago, I received an email from the Editor-in-Chief of an Internet sports site to which I contribute. It was addressed to all of the Featured Columnists. He admonished us to think more about packaging and less about content when we put together our articles. He talked about using multimedia presentations, slide shows, and other creative means of packaging our work to increase interest and drive traffic.
This editor talked about how the days of just writing a great article and letting it stand on its own merits are forever gone. He held up the newspaper industry as proof positive that the game has changed. Across the country, once-mighty traditional newspapers are dead, dying, or reinventing themselves to survive.
It all made sense.
It also struck a rather sad chord somewhere in me. I know I have heard all of this before…not in another secular industry, but in a sacred one. Have ministers not been told for a decade or so that the packaging has become paramount? Sure, we give lip service to the message, but you can tell that too many believe that if they have enough sizzle and pop in their presentation, the message could be in Na’vi (no, I haven’t seen Avatar, but I don’t live under a rock, either) and the congregation— I know that is an old-fashioned term: let’s call them the consumers— will eat it up, dance in the aisle, tell all their friends, and, perhaps most importantly, drop their wallets in the plate.
Whether you are writing a sports article or delivering the gospel, the prevailing message is that you have to keep up with the Camerons (as in James Cameron, Hollywood innovator) in order to be relevant. Maybe it is true. Maybe the package is more important than the Gift.
Or maybe we have turned church into some high-tech infotainment nonsense that feeds our egos and arouses our senses, and then confused that with worship. Maybe we think that providing entertainment that is arousing enough to pull this generation from their iPads and HDTVs just one time per week (though they may Tweet a “totally awesome” point you make while you are talking) is the essence of the Great Commission.
Look, before you pop a hernia or froth too much at the mouth, I am not saying we should not use available technology in presenting the Gospel. I am not saying that churches that are “cutting edge” are dens of iniquity. I am not even saying that I do not appreciate a multimedia presentation of the gospel.
I am saying this: if you spend most of your time consumed with the packaging, the presentation, until the message is more of an afterthought than you will ever admit, you have missed the mark and the meaning of ministry. Moreover, simply arousing the senses is not worship.
At least, Abraham didn’t seem to think so when he grabbed Isaac’s hand and his trusty knife and said, “The child and I are going up that mountain to worship.”
Go ahead and write me off as the Crusty Crab if you want to, Spongebob, but deep down in that dried out inside where you once soaked up Jesus until he oozed out your pores, you know I am right.
Who am I to talk? Forget I mentioned it.
God bless your Sunday.
This Too Shall Pass…But How?
Disclaimer: If you are a Christian weak in the faith or easily swayed by the brutal honesty of a man you might ordinarily expect to encourage and uplift you by handing you a pair of rose-tinted glasses and calling them “Faith,” then please…read no further. This is a blog and a blog is a journey. The journeyer sometimes knows where he is going and sometimes he doesn’t even know where he is coming from. So, read at your own risk.
Mark this under the heading, “Things I Would Have Told You Then, But Didn’t Know Until Now. Sorry About That.”
I remember repeating from the pulpit the oft-told story about the woman who testified in prayer meeting, “Whenever I have any trouble, I open my Bible and read. It isn’t very long before I see the words, ‘And it came to pass.’ That’s when I close my Bible and say, ‘Thank God it didn’t come to stay. It came to pass.’”
Don't come unraveled
I told that story, as did ten thousand other preachers, to encourage people not to whine too much about their troubles, not to fret overmuch about hardships. We reasoned that these things are temporary. They pass. You know, the ol’ “Tough times never last; tough people do” kind of speech. Probably we wanted to encourage folks who were going through bad times. Or, maybe we just wearied of listening to their incessant bitching.
In any case, we weren’t lying. Troubles are temporary. Tough times usually don’t last. God is good. This little bit of suffering is nothing compared to eternal bliss. All that. True enough.
But we might have left a couple of things out, probably because we just didn’t know better.
“This, too, shall pass.” We know that. What else do we need to know?
First, how will it pass? Will it recede quietly into the night, just slip away while you sleep, maybe leave an “I’m Sorry” note and a chocolate on your pillow? Will you wake tomorrow and the problem just packed its bags and left somewhere in the night?
Not likely. It is more apt to pass the way a kidney stone does, with its jagged edges wreaking havoc, buckling your knees, tearing through you like Quantrill’s Raiders. It may leave you (euphemistically speaking, of course) pissing blood for days after it’s departure. But at least it will be gone and you should feel better soon.
Second consideration is this: why does it pass? Maybe it is like the joke about how big the mosquitoes are in Houston. A guy said he overheard two mosquitoes discussing whether to eat him right there on the spot or cart him off somewhere before the big mosquitoes showed up and took him from them. Maybe that is why that little heartache, setback, bump in the road passed.
Maybe when your trouble left, it was just getting out of the way of what’s coming.
I know this line of reasoning is pessimistic, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be true. It can be. It might be.
Are you ready to deal with that?
Yesterday was a horrible day at my house. There was tension, disagreements, problems to solve, issues to resolve. At the end of the day, my wife climbed into my beautiful, silver Dodge Ram pickup truck. I was picking her up from work.
She shook her head and let out a cleansing little sigh, saying, “What a day, huh?”
“Yeah. Thank God it is just about over,” says me.
At 6:30 this morning, I went to start that same truck to let its engine warm. It wasn’t where I left it. It wasn’t anywhere close to where I left it. It was gone. Just…gone. Stolen by a faceless, nameless thief.
(I had to pause to regain myself from a fit of maniacal laughter just now. Sorry.)
And we thought yesterday’s troubles couldn’t end soon enough. We didn’t know they were just scooting over for the big boys, who were moving in today.
It isn’t like we weren’t warned. Momma said there would be days like this. So did Job…and Jesus:
“Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.” ~Job 14:1
“…in the world you shall have tribulation…” ~John 16:33
So, yeah. There you have it. Troubles do eventually pass. Some linger for years. Some even a lifetime. Whether now (this life, this realm) or later (the afterlife, eternity), all troubles will pass. The passing may be unpleasant. The troubles yet to come may make you pine for the ones you have now, as if these were blessings and not burdens.
I just wanted you to know: troubles come and troubles go. Some troubles are coming while the others are going. Sometimes you can take positive actions to hasten their departure. Other times, all you can do is let them run their course.
One thing I know: without faith in a higher purpose, without faith that all of this seeming madness makes sense to the One Whose perspective is as high above ours as the heavens are above the earth, this constant parade of trouble might get more than a little disheartening.
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The JourneyMan by D. Gene Strother is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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