I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar"
Proverbs 31:10-31
This summer, using the book of Proverbs, I’ve tried to highlight some of the very practical, moral issues we face as believers. That’s one of the reasons I like the book of Proverbs--because of their down-to-earth practicality. If our faith is going to make sense, it has to make sense in real time, and in real life situations. That’s what we’ve looked at over the past couple of months.
This morning I end the series with the final chapter of Proverbs. Though I have talked with some experience about the issues we’ve looked at so far in the book, coming to this last chapter of Proverbs, I confess I will be demonstrating my stunning ignorance. We close out this sermon series with a topic so profound, so mysterious, so much of an enigma, that I am, even now, totally over my head before I even get started. I will be talking about women, this morning. And even though I have no idea what I’m talking about, yet I charge on.
There was once a guy who really pleased God. God was just so happy with this guy, God went to him and said, “I just want you to know how proud I am of you. You are an exemplary and faithful man. You have demonstrated your faith and trust in me beyond measure.”
Then God went on to say to this guy, “I don’t usually do this; but I am so pleased with you, I am going to grant you one wish. Anything. You just name it.”
The guy stood there a little overwhelmed. But after a moment, he said, “You know, God, I love going to Hawaii. But flying is such a hassle, and kind of expensive. So, if I could have anything, I’d like a bridge from California to Hawaii.”
God looked at the guy and said, “You’ve got to be kidding! That’s your wish? Do you know what you’re asking? We’re talking about building a bridge across an ocean! Certainly you can come up with a different request.
So they guy stood there a little while longer, and said, “OK, God. Here’s what I want. I really want to understand women. I want to be able to get inside their heads and hearts and know how they think, and how they feel. That’s what I want--to be able to really understand women.”
There was a long pause of silence from God, and then God said, “Do you want that bridge to be two lanes or four?”
So, in talking about women this morning, I understand I’m going to a place that even God fears to go. I’m trying to help us understand something that even God doesn’t understand. And Solomon, who is thought to have been the compiler of this book of Proverbs, had rooms full of wives and concubines. Maybe he thought that the more women he had, the better he’d understand them. Evidently, having one or a thousand women around, he still was baffled by the mystery. So here I go, over the edge of that mystery.
I’m thinking it must be hard to be a woman. There are so many instances where I pause, after hearing another lament from a woman, that I think to myself, “It’s good to be a guy.”
We need look no further than the presidential campaign. Michele Bachman, Republican candidate for president is also a fundamentalist Christian. She was asked, during the Republican debate in Iowa, prior to the straw poll, if she would be obedient and subservient to her husband, according to her beliefs. What was behind the question was, if she really believed that as a Christian, who would really be president if she was elected, she or her husband? What if her husband said, “You need to order troops into Somalia and take care of the civil unrest there.” Would she “honor” her husband, as a subservient Christian wife, and obey what he told her?
No guy, running for president would be asked that question, except for maybe Bill Clinton. It’s a weird tension, in which a woman like Michele Bachman can run for the most authoritative position in our country, but in her own church is not allowed to speak or vote because she’s a woman. That she can have power over every citizen in the land, but is not allowed to teach men in her church. That she could aspire to be the ruler of the greatest and most powerful nation on the globe, but in her church she can’t be an elder, or serve on a church board. She’d be the number one citizen for her country as President, but a second class person in her church. There’s got to be a weird disconnect in her mind as a woman. As a Christian woman.
“A good woman is hard to find, and worth far more than diamonds,” Solomon starts out in his ode to women, in Proverbs 31. But as you heard read, the rest of the chapter is not talking about the good woman. It’s talking about the super good woman. Good, according to this description, is a Herculean sized assignment. It makes womanhood equal to carrying the whole world on her back.
The late Erma Bombeck was great at understanding the impossible expectations on women. The perfect ideal of womanhood is always held up, but Bombeck, in a humorous way helped us understand this super woman doesn’t really exist. And if she does, Bombeck perceptively noted, no one wants to be around her. The really interesting people are the ones who are imperfect.
This is how Erma Bombeck described the super woman:
Super woman:
--knows, without turning her head, who’s making faces at who in the back seat of the car;
--has a homing device for all lost items build into her brain;
--gives three weeks notice before dying and interviews suitable applicants for her replacement;
--knows how to talk to auto mechanics about her car;
--is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than maximum strength Tylenol, and is able to leap six shopping carts on double coupon day;
--polishes the garden hoses;
--goes to the doctor and he tells her to put on some weight;
--washes and reuses aluminum foil and zip lock bags;
--keeps all her houseplants alive and thriving.
But the real woman, is more like this, says Bombeck:
--She can’t remember her kids names, even though she spent months before each birth coming up with a name that would be easy to remember;
--She’s afraid that after she dies no one will know how to replace the toilet tissue on those spring loaded holders;
--She defrosts the pot roast with a blow dryer;
--She gets lonely enough to talk to the full length cardboard figure of John Madden at the True Value Hardware store;
--She hides candy under the dish towel knowing the kids will never find it;
--She sometimes puts her pantyhose on backwards;
--She never reads Hints From Heloise.
That’s part of the dilemma of being a woman in our society today. You have to be strong, but not too strong, or you’re looked down on as pushy, bossy or domineering. At the same time you have to be sensitive, but not too sensitive. No one wants to be around the woman who’s crying all the time. Even House Speaker Boehner found that out, and he’s a guy. A woman has to be ideal and real at the same time. She has to be perfect, but not too perfect, because we all know--don’t we--that super perfectionism is really boring. It’s some of the lesser traits that make for interesting and attractive people.
As Erma Bombeck said, in writing about one super woman she knew:
Sharon was a super woman.
Her gynecologist said it.
Her butcher said it.
Her tennis partner said it.
Her children…Her children never said it.
They spent a lot of time with Rick’s mom who ate cookies out of a box and taught them how to play poker.
It’s not our perfection that makes us likable and interesting people, but our quirks and imperfections.
There’s a couple of things that bug me about this list in Proverbs 31 about the good woman. She’s expected to do everything as a provider. I’m wondering what a guy’s supposed to do. Maybe that’s why Solomon wrote this list up the way he did. Maybe he sat down, and was thinking, “Man, this is going to be in the Bible some day, so I’ve got to make it good, so that guys are off the hook for being responsible for anything.” Forever after, women have their backs loaded with all kinds of tasks and responsibilities that defines them as good. As long as they are doing all this stuff, they’re good women. There’s very little here in this list about a woman’s character, person, or personality. And there’s only one, cursory comment at the very end about her relationship with God.
There’s the dilemma isn’t it? Are women good because of simply who they are as unique human beings, with their inherent differences from men as God created them? Or is a woman good because of all the stuff she accomplishes? And the more stuff the better? What is it that women have to prove? I’m wondering if the answers to that question would be widely different between women and men.
This is not just a personal problem. Women are finding themselves trying to play the roles of warrior, heroine and martyr. Such roles are fairly intense when women are trying to be wife and mother. But these roles can be even more intense at work. While more and more women are assuming roles as managers a new study reveals that rather than using what should come more easily to them like empathy and compassion, these women are increasingly turning to the stereotypically more 'male' traits, such as aggression, to get results.
A study by Professor Paula Nicolson, from the Department of Health and Social Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, says that instead of fighting their 'natural instincts' women should embrace them because displaying emotional intelligence is the key to being a better leader.
That’s why there are only two verses that caught my eye, in this long list of stuff a good woman is supposed to pull off. It’s verse 25 and 26:
Strength and dignity are her clothing,
and she laughs at the time to come.
She opens her mouth with wisdom,
and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but these are the qualities that are attractive to me about a woman. It doesn’t have anything to do with how much she sews, how much food she grows and prepares, or how economically profitable she makes her family’s life.
To me it’s about character. Individual strength and dignity. Having a sense of humor about life, helping find positive ways around possible hardships. Speaking out of wisdom rather than pseudo-knowledge or arrogance. Being a person of kindness toward others--which means to me that she doesn’t see life as being all about her.
I like the term dignity, here in this verse. Dignity has to do with the sense that you are seen, heard, and acknowledged for who you are and treated as if you matter. Not matter because you can accomplish a long list of stuff, like Solomon puts here at the end of Proverbs. But you matter because you are you.
Probably most of us know what it’s like to be treated with less than dignity: to be treated as inferior, discriminated against, ignored, misunderstood, criticized and excluded. There is little worse than being in a situation where you are treated unfairly and can do nothing about it, or being excluded from something that means a lot to you.
The first beatitude in Jesus’ sermon on the mount is, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” It isn’t about being financially poor, but “poor in spirit.” That is, those who have had their dignity stripped from them.
In Matthew 11, Jesus is talking to a group of people when some of John’s disciples ask if Jesus is the one they’re waiting for. In his reply, Jesus tells them to tell John, that “...the Good News is preached to the poor.” Again, this word doesn’t mean the financially poor, but those who have been treated with indignity, who have been made spiritually poor by life, or by their own choices.
When I think of those whom Jesus talked to who had their dignity stripped--both by themselves and by others--it was women. The woman at the well, who had several husbands, and still hadn’t gotten the relationship thing right. She had done enough to taint her own female dignity, but that was compounded by the way she was treated. To her Jesus revealed in no uncertain terms that he was the Messiah, the Christ of God. By doing that, he helped upgrade her sense of dignity, because he didn’t do that with anyone else, except the disciples.
There was the woman caught in adultery. She also tainted her own dignity by her actions. But those who caught her were trying to literally strip her naked of any dignity she may have had left. To her Jesus said, “I do not condemn you either. Go, but do not sin again.” He restored her dignity by a total absence of being judgmental, and a gave her, instead, a grace-filled second chance at life.
There was the woman with the 12 year issue of blood, who wasn’t even supposed to be out in public. Part of her indignity was being barred from worship and public life for her condition. She touched Jesus’ clothes and was healed. To her Jesus said, “My daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your trouble.” Her trouble wasn’t just her medical condition. It was also her indignity, which Jesus restored.
And there was Mary Magdalene whose life, before she met Jesus, was characterized and captivated by evil. But Jesus cast out all that evil from her life, restored her dignity, and made her one of his closest disciples. There has even been some conjecture, lately, that the Gospel of John was really written by her.
Solomon’s kind of right. It’s nice to have a woman around the house, who wears a tool belt, can fix anything, and do anything. Maybe a woman can try to earn her dignity in that way. In these verses, Solomon has kind of set you women up to try to do that. But for the way I see things, as a follower of Jesus, dignity is something you are given by Christ, no matter what your past has been, or no matter how good you think you are. Then you live into that grace-full dignity conferred by Jesus. That’s the Good News, not just for women, but also for we men.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
A Bit Of Advice
"A Bit of Advice'
Proverbs 11:14; 13:10; 15:22
I’m going to start out by offering a riddle. I’ve decided not to give the answer to the riddle until the end of the sermon. I realize that I might be taking a chance that some will be concentrating harder on the riddle than the message, but both go together, so the time would not be spent entirely in vain.
Here’s the riddle.
You are on the road of life and you come to a fork in the road. One road leads to heaven and the other to hell. There are two guides standing at the fork in the road from whom you can ask one question only (one question total; not one question apiece). One of these guides is an absolute liar and will not tell you the truth. The other is an absolute truth teller, and you can be confident he will tell you which road is right and which road leads to hell. But you don’t know which guide is which.
The riddle is, What one (only one) question can you ask of one of these guides that will give you an assured answer so you will know you have chosen the right road? One further bit of information: Even after you have received your answer and are sure you are on the right road, you will still not know which of the guides told the truth and which was the liar. But you will know with certainty that you have chosen the right road.
See what you can come up with, as to the correct question to ask either guide, and I’ll check back in with you at the end of the message.
Well, the question that these proverbs are begging us to ask is, “How can we get the best kind of advice with a problem we are wrestling with, or are in some way looking for advice? Our lives, indeed the world we currently live in, can get so complex. And looking for advice usually doesn’t come cheap. Not many people can afford to visit a number of CPA’s, psychologists, lawyers, doctors, etc. We all have friends and family that we can talk to for advice, but there may be times when we don’t feel comfortable “spilling our guts” to a great number of people.
So, one interesting question you might ask yourself is, “How many people do you consult when you have a problem?”
I’m going to offer two bits of advice about problem solving and seeking advice, and then illustrate that advice with three points from our Proverbs read this morning.
The first bit of advice has to do with a strategy, or formula for dealing with a problem, that most of us, may in one way or another follow. The first part of the formula is to pinpoint the exact problem we are facing. This is crucial to the rest of the formula, as we shall see in a moment. If we identify the wrong problem, any solutions, or any advice we may get along the way, will be ultimately unhelpful. Then we’ll have to start all over again.
Remember, a few weeks ago we talked about handling anger. I talked about how often people ask the wrong question about their anger. The question they usually ask is, “Why do other people make me so mad?” A better question, when getting advice is, “Why do I allow other people to make me angry?” Or, the better question might be, “Where is the hurt and pain in my own life that may be the seat of my anger?” Sometimes, in getting advice, the first thing you need is to find out how to pinpoint the exact problem you are dealing with.
Next, after pinpointing the problem, we need to identify two or three alternative solutions to the problem. Dealing with problems in our lives, help is always found in discovering what the options are. Often, when we get all wrapped up in our issues and problems, our horizon shrinks down too small. Remember, I likened it to blinders on the horse. Identifying optional solutions helps take the blinders off and lets us see there’s a much broader horizon to see, many more options to our problem, and then find our way home.
And the next step in the problem-solving formula is to ask three questions of each of the alternative solutions we have identified. These are the three questions:
First, What are the consequences of each alternative solution?
One of the things I’ve seen in working with kids for so many years in my ministry, is that they have thought less and less about consequences of their actions. When I was in Leoti I coached the junior high girls basketball teams. We had a couple of kids rub Spam all over the lockers and benches of the visiting team’s locker room. When talking with them afterwards, both had no thought that what they did was going to have really negative consequences, like being suspended from the basketball team for a couple of games. It didn’t even enter their minds that there were consequences for what they chose to do. Thinking of consequences can help head off other problems.
The other two questions are:
What are the values and virtues that are being upheld if I chose this alternative?
What are the values and virtues that are being denied if I chose this alternative?
These two questions have to do with helping us understand there’s a weird balance of values and virtues that either get upheld or denied with each alternative we might choose.
When I talk with couples I tell them they need to fashion a mission statement for their marriage and families. One young couple with kids I talked to out in California, decided that their mission statement was to be as financially sound and secure as possible. That’s a good value to uphold, to make sure they and their kids will be taken care of financially. But that meant both the husband and wife had to work full-time. They were amassing a nice nest egg with two huge incomes. But what they didn’t see was that they were denying some basic values of family togetherness and parenting time with their children. They, as parents, were hardly every home. A nanny was raising their children, and developing the relationship they wished they had with their kids.
The second bit of advice, which is also the first point of our Proverbs, is don’t go through this strategy alone. Don’t make decisions alone. We are not capable of seeing all the alternatives, consequences, or values being upheld and denied all by ourselves. Even to rely only on one other person’s advice may not be enough. The Bible is full of examples where one worthless adviser steered whole nations to corruption. In one story in 2 Chronicles (22:3-4) the king’s mother, serving as his sole adviser, led him to ruin.
Let’s look, for example, at one of Jesus’ parables. It’s the one about the rich fool in Luke 12.
The farm of a certain rich man produced a terrific crop. He talked to himself: “What can I do? My barn isn’t big enough for this harvest.” Then he said to himself, “Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll gather in all my grain and goods, and I’ll say to myself, ‘Self, you’ve done well! You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it easy and have the time of your life.’” Just then God showed up and said, “Fool! Tonight you die. And your barn full of goods--who gets all that?” (Then Jesus adds this killer of a statement) “That’s what happens when you fill your barn with self and not with God.”
Who was the farmer talking to and seeking advice from in this parable? Himself. This is even more striking when you understand that middle eastern men spend hours talking with each other, tossing around their decisions with each other. The slightest transaction is worthy of hours of discussion amongst the men of a middle eastern community. The mind is made up, and decisions are faced, in community; not in isolation. He does his thinking in a crowd.
But this man in Jesus’ parable does his thinking in isolation. When he needs a dialogue, a community of advice, he can only talk to himself.
Also, as he reasoned to himself, he asked the wrong question at the outset. He decided his problem was one of storage: “What can I do? My barn is not big enough for the harvest.” Had he had some friends to talk over the situation with, friends who would shoot straight with him, he might have been able to see the deeper problem, that of being rich toward God. Indeed, as the parable implies, the farmer doesn’t even consult God. By seeking the advice of others he may have been able to have been pointed out to him that he made a critical error up front when deciding what the main issue was. As a result, his alternative was wrong. The consequences were unexpected and deadly. The values of self were upheld, but the values of God were denied.
A second point to ponder from the Proverbs is that unchecked assumptions are almost always dangerous. In Proverbs 13:10, that’s what arrogance and presumption are all about. It is the taking upon ourselves the responsibility or authority to decide something without permission to do so. It is the acceptance of something as true, when we haven’t looked for any proof to the contrary. Or, it could be accepting something as false, because it just doesn’t add up in OUR heads.
It was on the eve of the great 1938 New England hurricane. A man living in Stamford, Connecticut decided to fulfill a long-standing desire. He walked two miles to the Abercrombie and Fitch department store in downtown, and bought a fine barometer.
Delighted with his acquisition, he hurried home and proudly hung the handsome brass barometer on his living room wall. But what he saw made him angry. The barometer was pointing at “hurricane.” Hurricane in New England!? Convinced that he had been sold a defective instrument, he walked back to the department store, handed the barometer to the sales clerk and snorted, “Fine barometer you sold me. I put it up in my house and what do you suppose it registered? ‘Hurricane!’” The sales clerk replied, “No problem, sir. We’ll be happy to replace it with a perfect one.”
Again the man headed for home with his new barometer, walking against a very stiff wind. But by the time he arrived home, his house had been blown away by a hurricane.
In our strategy of taking a look at our issues, this is the problem of making assumptions. We think we have all the answers and shut ourselves off from other alternative solutions. The man with the barometer had at least two alternatives. Either the barometer was defective (which was his erroneous assumption); or, it was telling the truth and he better evacuate his family. He suffered the consequences of sticking to his singleminded assumption without checking it out with other information.
Here, humility is called for, in opening ourselves up to advice from others. We need to be humble enough to say, “I don’t have all the answers; my viewpoint just may not be the correct one; or, my viewpoint is not the only one admissible.” We need to be able to hear more than only what we agree with. Otherwise, we may find ourselves in an embarrassing situation. Or worse.
Jesus put it a little differently in another parable. He told his disciples to count the cost.
Is there anyone here who, planning to build a new house, doesn’t first sit down and figure the cost so you’ll know if you can complete it? (In other words, think about the consequences ahead of time.) If you only get the foundation laid and then run out of money, you’re going to look pretty foolish. Everyone passing by will poke fun at you: “He started something he couldn’t finish!”
Or can you imagine a king going into battle against another king without first deciding whether it is possible with his ten thousand troops to face the twenty thousand troops of the other? And if he decides he can’t, won’t he send an emissary and work out a truce? (Luke 14:28-31)
Notice that if either man in this parable makes the wrong assumption about his wealth or strength, he is humiliated and doomed. But in the counsel of many, this danger can be checked and avoided.
One Sunday School teacher asked her class why they thought Solomon was so wise. One little boy in the back raised his hand and said, “Because he had so many wives to tell him what to do.”
So back to the riddle. The important question, before I give you the answer, is how did you think you’d figure out the answer? Did you automatically think, “I’ve got to figure this out on my own?” Or, did you think, “I’ve got a bunch of people in the pew here who, working together, could come up with the answer to the riddle?” If you automatically went to trying to figure it out on your own, then maybe you’ll need to reread this message on the church blog site tomorrow morning.
OK, what’s the one question you can ask of either man at the crossroads, that will put you on the right road? You can only ask one question. And you don’t know which of the guides is telling the truth or lying. So you ask this question to either guide: “Tell me, if I were to ask the other guide which is the right road, what would he tell me?” And then you take the opposite road of the answer.
Here’s the logic. If, by chance, you ask the liar your question, he will lie about the true answer the other man would give you. So you would know that you would need to take the opposite road from what the liar would say. If, by chance, you asked the truth telling guide, he will truthfully report the lie that the liar would have told you. So you know the opposite road is the answer. Thus, the question will produce the wrong road no matter who answers it. And you take the opposite.
Anybody get it right? Maybe if you were able to discuss the problem amongst many advisers, you would have come up with the correct question.
Proverbs 11:14; 13:10; 15:22
I’m going to start out by offering a riddle. I’ve decided not to give the answer to the riddle until the end of the sermon. I realize that I might be taking a chance that some will be concentrating harder on the riddle than the message, but both go together, so the time would not be spent entirely in vain.
Here’s the riddle.
You are on the road of life and you come to a fork in the road. One road leads to heaven and the other to hell. There are two guides standing at the fork in the road from whom you can ask one question only (one question total; not one question apiece). One of these guides is an absolute liar and will not tell you the truth. The other is an absolute truth teller, and you can be confident he will tell you which road is right and which road leads to hell. But you don’t know which guide is which.
The riddle is, What one (only one) question can you ask of one of these guides that will give you an assured answer so you will know you have chosen the right road? One further bit of information: Even after you have received your answer and are sure you are on the right road, you will still not know which of the guides told the truth and which was the liar. But you will know with certainty that you have chosen the right road.
See what you can come up with, as to the correct question to ask either guide, and I’ll check back in with you at the end of the message.
Well, the question that these proverbs are begging us to ask is, “How can we get the best kind of advice with a problem we are wrestling with, or are in some way looking for advice? Our lives, indeed the world we currently live in, can get so complex. And looking for advice usually doesn’t come cheap. Not many people can afford to visit a number of CPA’s, psychologists, lawyers, doctors, etc. We all have friends and family that we can talk to for advice, but there may be times when we don’t feel comfortable “spilling our guts” to a great number of people.
So, one interesting question you might ask yourself is, “How many people do you consult when you have a problem?”
I’m going to offer two bits of advice about problem solving and seeking advice, and then illustrate that advice with three points from our Proverbs read this morning.
The first bit of advice has to do with a strategy, or formula for dealing with a problem, that most of us, may in one way or another follow. The first part of the formula is to pinpoint the exact problem we are facing. This is crucial to the rest of the formula, as we shall see in a moment. If we identify the wrong problem, any solutions, or any advice we may get along the way, will be ultimately unhelpful. Then we’ll have to start all over again.
Remember, a few weeks ago we talked about handling anger. I talked about how often people ask the wrong question about their anger. The question they usually ask is, “Why do other people make me so mad?” A better question, when getting advice is, “Why do I allow other people to make me angry?” Or, the better question might be, “Where is the hurt and pain in my own life that may be the seat of my anger?” Sometimes, in getting advice, the first thing you need is to find out how to pinpoint the exact problem you are dealing with.
Next, after pinpointing the problem, we need to identify two or three alternative solutions to the problem. Dealing with problems in our lives, help is always found in discovering what the options are. Often, when we get all wrapped up in our issues and problems, our horizon shrinks down too small. Remember, I likened it to blinders on the horse. Identifying optional solutions helps take the blinders off and lets us see there’s a much broader horizon to see, many more options to our problem, and then find our way home.
And the next step in the problem-solving formula is to ask three questions of each of the alternative solutions we have identified. These are the three questions:
First, What are the consequences of each alternative solution?
One of the things I’ve seen in working with kids for so many years in my ministry, is that they have thought less and less about consequences of their actions. When I was in Leoti I coached the junior high girls basketball teams. We had a couple of kids rub Spam all over the lockers and benches of the visiting team’s locker room. When talking with them afterwards, both had no thought that what they did was going to have really negative consequences, like being suspended from the basketball team for a couple of games. It didn’t even enter their minds that there were consequences for what they chose to do. Thinking of consequences can help head off other problems.
The other two questions are:
What are the values and virtues that are being upheld if I chose this alternative?
What are the values and virtues that are being denied if I chose this alternative?
These two questions have to do with helping us understand there’s a weird balance of values and virtues that either get upheld or denied with each alternative we might choose.
When I talk with couples I tell them they need to fashion a mission statement for their marriage and families. One young couple with kids I talked to out in California, decided that their mission statement was to be as financially sound and secure as possible. That’s a good value to uphold, to make sure they and their kids will be taken care of financially. But that meant both the husband and wife had to work full-time. They were amassing a nice nest egg with two huge incomes. But what they didn’t see was that they were denying some basic values of family togetherness and parenting time with their children. They, as parents, were hardly every home. A nanny was raising their children, and developing the relationship they wished they had with their kids.
The second bit of advice, which is also the first point of our Proverbs, is don’t go through this strategy alone. Don’t make decisions alone. We are not capable of seeing all the alternatives, consequences, or values being upheld and denied all by ourselves. Even to rely only on one other person’s advice may not be enough. The Bible is full of examples where one worthless adviser steered whole nations to corruption. In one story in 2 Chronicles (22:3-4) the king’s mother, serving as his sole adviser, led him to ruin.
Let’s look, for example, at one of Jesus’ parables. It’s the one about the rich fool in Luke 12.
The farm of a certain rich man produced a terrific crop. He talked to himself: “What can I do? My barn isn’t big enough for this harvest.” Then he said to himself, “Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll gather in all my grain and goods, and I’ll say to myself, ‘Self, you’ve done well! You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it easy and have the time of your life.’” Just then God showed up and said, “Fool! Tonight you die. And your barn full of goods--who gets all that?” (Then Jesus adds this killer of a statement) “That’s what happens when you fill your barn with self and not with God.”
Who was the farmer talking to and seeking advice from in this parable? Himself. This is even more striking when you understand that middle eastern men spend hours talking with each other, tossing around their decisions with each other. The slightest transaction is worthy of hours of discussion amongst the men of a middle eastern community. The mind is made up, and decisions are faced, in community; not in isolation. He does his thinking in a crowd.
But this man in Jesus’ parable does his thinking in isolation. When he needs a dialogue, a community of advice, he can only talk to himself.
Also, as he reasoned to himself, he asked the wrong question at the outset. He decided his problem was one of storage: “What can I do? My barn is not big enough for the harvest.” Had he had some friends to talk over the situation with, friends who would shoot straight with him, he might have been able to see the deeper problem, that of being rich toward God. Indeed, as the parable implies, the farmer doesn’t even consult God. By seeking the advice of others he may have been able to have been pointed out to him that he made a critical error up front when deciding what the main issue was. As a result, his alternative was wrong. The consequences were unexpected and deadly. The values of self were upheld, but the values of God were denied.
A second point to ponder from the Proverbs is that unchecked assumptions are almost always dangerous. In Proverbs 13:10, that’s what arrogance and presumption are all about. It is the taking upon ourselves the responsibility or authority to decide something without permission to do so. It is the acceptance of something as true, when we haven’t looked for any proof to the contrary. Or, it could be accepting something as false, because it just doesn’t add up in OUR heads.
It was on the eve of the great 1938 New England hurricane. A man living in Stamford, Connecticut decided to fulfill a long-standing desire. He walked two miles to the Abercrombie and Fitch department store in downtown, and bought a fine barometer.
Delighted with his acquisition, he hurried home and proudly hung the handsome brass barometer on his living room wall. But what he saw made him angry. The barometer was pointing at “hurricane.” Hurricane in New England!? Convinced that he had been sold a defective instrument, he walked back to the department store, handed the barometer to the sales clerk and snorted, “Fine barometer you sold me. I put it up in my house and what do you suppose it registered? ‘Hurricane!’” The sales clerk replied, “No problem, sir. We’ll be happy to replace it with a perfect one.”
Again the man headed for home with his new barometer, walking against a very stiff wind. But by the time he arrived home, his house had been blown away by a hurricane.
In our strategy of taking a look at our issues, this is the problem of making assumptions. We think we have all the answers and shut ourselves off from other alternative solutions. The man with the barometer had at least two alternatives. Either the barometer was defective (which was his erroneous assumption); or, it was telling the truth and he better evacuate his family. He suffered the consequences of sticking to his singleminded assumption without checking it out with other information.
Here, humility is called for, in opening ourselves up to advice from others. We need to be humble enough to say, “I don’t have all the answers; my viewpoint just may not be the correct one; or, my viewpoint is not the only one admissible.” We need to be able to hear more than only what we agree with. Otherwise, we may find ourselves in an embarrassing situation. Or worse.
Jesus put it a little differently in another parable. He told his disciples to count the cost.
Is there anyone here who, planning to build a new house, doesn’t first sit down and figure the cost so you’ll know if you can complete it? (In other words, think about the consequences ahead of time.) If you only get the foundation laid and then run out of money, you’re going to look pretty foolish. Everyone passing by will poke fun at you: “He started something he couldn’t finish!”
Or can you imagine a king going into battle against another king without first deciding whether it is possible with his ten thousand troops to face the twenty thousand troops of the other? And if he decides he can’t, won’t he send an emissary and work out a truce? (Luke 14:28-31)
Notice that if either man in this parable makes the wrong assumption about his wealth or strength, he is humiliated and doomed. But in the counsel of many, this danger can be checked and avoided.
One Sunday School teacher asked her class why they thought Solomon was so wise. One little boy in the back raised his hand and said, “Because he had so many wives to tell him what to do.”
So back to the riddle. The important question, before I give you the answer, is how did you think you’d figure out the answer? Did you automatically think, “I’ve got to figure this out on my own?” Or, did you think, “I’ve got a bunch of people in the pew here who, working together, could come up with the answer to the riddle?” If you automatically went to trying to figure it out on your own, then maybe you’ll need to reread this message on the church blog site tomorrow morning.
OK, what’s the one question you can ask of either man at the crossroads, that will put you on the right road? You can only ask one question. And you don’t know which of the guides is telling the truth or lying. So you ask this question to either guide: “Tell me, if I were to ask the other guide which is the right road, what would he tell me?” And then you take the opposite road of the answer.
Here’s the logic. If, by chance, you ask the liar your question, he will lie about the true answer the other man would give you. So you would know that you would need to take the opposite road from what the liar would say. If, by chance, you asked the truth telling guide, he will truthfully report the lie that the liar would have told you. So you know the opposite road is the answer. Thus, the question will produce the wrong road no matter who answers it. And you take the opposite.
Anybody get it right? Maybe if you were able to discuss the problem amongst many advisers, you would have come up with the correct question.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Quotidian Faith
"Quotidian Faith"
Proverbs 12:28; 14:6; 15:21; 17:24
I first ran into this word, quotidian, while staying in a Benedictine monastery up in NW Missouri for a couple of weeks. I was trying to find a spiritual island upon which I could rest and avoid burnout. I spent a lot of days and late evenings in the stacks of the library there, reading, thinking, praying; mostly slowing down the merry-go-round that had become my life.
One of my favorite authors is Kathleen Norris, a transplanted New York City poet, now living in Lemmon, a tiny town in northern South Dakota. I got to meet her a few years back at the Convocation of the High Plains. Kathleen was one of our main speakers.
I had read all her books, I thought, including her collection of poetry, titled, Little Girls In Church. Her poetry was a lot more provocative than I expected. But there, buried in the stacks of my two week home, that nearly silent monastery, I came across this little book by Kathleen that I’d not heard of before. It had an odd title: The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women’s Work. It was a collection of talks she gave at a seminar at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame. I know what laundry is. And liturgy. And, because I’ve raised two kids pretty much on my own, I have an inkling about women’s work.
But I didn’t know what quotidian meant. It was a new word. I went looking for a dictionary. It simply means, “daily.” Of all the books I took down from the shelves of the Benedictine monastery library, that little one ended up being the most important for me at that time. Kathleen Norris helped me see, again, that there are daily routines and rhythms (simple daily tasks) that don’t seem too important. We might even call them by other names: drudgery, or menial, or more negatively, “donkey work.” But it’s in the donkey work of our daily routines, if our eyes are open, that are infused with holiness and the presence of God.
But we don’t see the quotidian, the every day kinds of routine, as particularly infused with the presence of God. In the book of Ecclesiastes Solomon’s depressive outlook on the world was that everything was a daily round-and-round that made life so awful. He looked at how so much in life occurs and reoccurs each day to the point that he ended up hating life. What his eyes couldn’t or wouldn’t see was how it is in the very dailiness of life that God makes himself known and visible. If God can’t reveal himself in our daily events, then how is God going to make himself known at all.
Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, wanted the big splash event. He wanted something entirely new that stood out from the daily routine. He wanted what Isaiah cried out to God for at one point, “Oh, that you would rip open the sky and come down.” That’s what Solomon wanted. The bright light that would knock him off his horse, like what happened with Paul. The burning bush, like what happened with Moses.
The wisdom of Proverbs, indeed of the whole Bible, is that God is rarely found in those kinds of splashy events that stand outside the boundaries of the dailyness of life. Most of the time, God is bumped into (or God bumps into us) as we are making our way through the everyday recurring routines and places of our lives. We say with Jacob, who spent the night out in the wilderness, using a rock for a pillow, having a dream about angels going up and down on a staircase: “Truly, God is in this place--and I didn’t even know it” (Genesis 28:17). It is when we are going about our daily routines, in our everyday places, not expecting a whole lot that we see God best.
Cynics look high and low for wisdom--and never find it;
The open minded find it right on their doorstep. (Proverbs 14:6)
We could substitute a lot of words in that proverb for the word wisdom. Life. Happiness. Contentment. Or, God. For so many people, wisdom, life, happiness, contentment, even God, is not here. Its got to be somewhere else. Out there. I was talking to a boy at the junior high at lunch one day, when I was working with special ed. kids in Leoti. He asked me why I moved to Leoti, KS. Why would I want to move to a place like Leoti after being in California, was his question. How could I like life here after being some place like California? His view was that I needed (or, more to the point, HE felt he needed) to be someplace else in order for life, happiness, contentment, whatever, to happen. Life was back there for me, according to this 7th grader. Or life was going to be found out there, away from this place.
The problems with that attitude are many. One is that you will never be satisfied. Suppose that boy moved away from Leoti some day. He’s convinced himself that nothing worthwhile is going to happen for him in Leoti. So, let’s say he goes some place else. But he’s already developed eyes that are closed to the ordinary, daily ways that God can make life good where you are at. He will get dissatisfied with the new place. Surely, what he is looking for is still out there some where. And off he goes. The search for life, for God, for whatever, becomes his life, rather than seeing life and God in the ordinary and everyday of where he is at the moment. Even in a place like Leoti.
There is the story of a man who lived in a simple house in a simple village. But he, like my junior high student, became dissatisfied. He thought to himself, as he looked at his wife, and children, and friends and town, that surely there is a better life out there some place else. So he left all that was his, and set out on his search.
At the end of the first day, he was deep in some woods. As he prepared to lie down and sleep, he wanted to make sure he headed in the right direction the next morning. He took off his shoes, and pointed them in the direction he was heading, so he could continue on in the morning. But during the night, another traveler came upon the man, saw the shoes, and pointed them in the opposite direction.
When the man awoke the next morning, refreshed and ready to continue his search for a new place, he put on his shoes and headed off in the direction they were pointing. Soon, he came to a little town with ordinary looking houses and ordinary looking people, and settled in with a familiar looking family, who had familiar looking friends. He said to himself, “Certainly this is a grand place, a better place than I was before.” The thing he desired, the thing he went searching for, was right on his doorstep all the time.
The empty-headed treat life as a plaything;
the perceptive grasp its meaning and make a go of it. (Proverbs 15:21)
Those who treat life as a plaything are also apt to treat God in the same way. That is, those kinds of people try to use life and God, rather than being immersed in life and God. Meaning will never be found by those kinds of people.
Because that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Finding meaning? The quotidian moments can convey not just a grab bag of emotions and sensations, but a sense of wonder, beauty, and peace. Meaning always bushwhacks the mundane. That is, it is in the mundane, tedious, daily routines of our lives that surprisingly and wondrously get ambushed and transformed into moments of holiness and revelation.
Annie Dillard is another favorite author. In her book, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, she wrote of one of these moments where meaning bushwhacked one of her ordinary moments. Pulling into a gas station on an interstate highway in Virginia, she discovered a holy moment in a convergence of mundane events: a simple conversation with the gas station attendant, a free cup of hot coffee, a frisky beagle puppy, and the setting sun’s light performing tricks on an enormous mountain range. She wrote of that quotidian moment:
This is it, I think; this is it, right now. The present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting a puppy, I am watching the mountain.
It doesn’t seem like much, does it. But meaning bushwhacked her mundane moments, and suddenly she felt immersed in life and full of God.
Of course, the nature of these quotidian moments is that you can’t punch an 800 number on your cell phone with one hand, while clutching a VISA card in your other hand, and order such a moment. You can’t pore over your calendar and pencil such a moment in for next Thursday. Much better to sharpen your senses to pay attention for the holy in the daily, recognizing that the fodder for quotidian and God-filled moments of meaning surrounds you.
In this age of frenetic activity and general racket of discordant emotions and voices, this means fighting. Fighting to keep your eyes open, to clear the cobwebs that shroud ears and eyes and souls from sensing. Fighting to sense the breeze through your hair, the sun upon your face, or hearing your friends quirky laugh, or looking up during a nighttime walk at a sky spread with stars like peanut butter. In all that and more, sensing this is it, this is that quotidian moment that gives me peace, that matches my pulse with the pulse of God, that gives me that certain sense of meaning that abides throughout the other 98 percent of life that appears so static, so obvious and so humdrum and unremarkable.
I think there is another aspect to this one proverb about treating life and God as a plaything and missing out on the opportunity to grasp meaning in the here and now, in the present moment. It has to do with cultivating a nonjudgmental awareness of the present. Think how we both consciously and unconsciously judge our present moments and places. I saw that in the junior high boy I mentioned earlier. He was making a value judgement that this present moment and this present place was not important, or is not filled with any kind of possibility. His judgement lead him to a sense of boredom and unfulfillment. This is not my real life. My real life was back when, or yet to come.
As long as we are looking at our quotidian, daily moments and places with a sense of judgement, we will not see what is really and actually here. Our judgmental attitudes only raises our stress, and adds to the shroud that covers our senses to the hand of God in the here and now. Because of judgementalism about our daily moments, we let the present slip away, allowing time to walk by unobserved and unseized, squandering the precious seconds of our lives.
The perceptive find wisdom in their own front yard;
fools look for it everywhere but right here. (Proverbs 17:24)
Once there was a cobbler who lived in a small village doing what he could to get by in his daily routine. One night he had a dream of finding a treasure under a bridge in a certain city. The next morning, he gathered some things together and headed for the city. There he found the bridge from his dream. For days he looked under, and around the bridge to find the treasure. He dug holes; he sorted through piles of trash. Nothing.
After several days of this, he sat dirty and exhausted on the bridge. He was ready to give up. A man standing near by struck up a conversation. The treasure hunter tells about his dream and the treasure. The stranger laughed, and then said, “Just the other night I had a dream of finding a buried treasure beside an old tree stump in the back yard of a cobbler who lived in some small village. But you don’t see me going off, chasing after nonsense that I only saw in a dream.” He laughed again, and walked away.
The cobbler, thinking of the old stump in his back yard, hurried home and dug up the treasure that was right in his own back yard all the time.
The buried treasure that all these proverbs are talking about is our daily, ordinary life. Each quotidian moment, each day, is a treasure waiting to be found, waiting to be recognized. They are treasures because God is in each of those moments, no matter how mundane. In fact, maybe the moments that lack the most interest for us are actually the most God-filled. It’s just a matter of seeing that and living into them.
I was watching an interview with Pat Summitt, the coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. She had won her 1000th game as a coach, more than any other coach in men’s or women’s basketball.
During the interview they filmed her talking to her team during timeouts. At one point she said to her team, “We didn’t do that well in that last segment. We need to rebound better if we are going to do better in the next segment.” Then, after that clip was over, Coach Summitt talked about how she breaks the game down into what she calls segments. Not quarters or halves, but smaller segments of how the flow of the game is going. In one segment they may be shooting well, but then all of a sudden, nothing is dropping, and they are moving into a different segment of the game. She described how she does that for the women on her team so they can stay in the moment of the game, and not think about what happened in the past segments, or what may or may not happen further on in the game.
I thought that was a good idea. When we’re looking at life, and how and when we find most meaning in it, it’s usually in the immediate segment we are living in. It’s in the “right here” as the proverb states. The same is true with how God shows up in our lives. God is the God of the immediate segment, because, when you think about it, that’s all we have. That’s where we live.
We are tempted (and we succumb to the temptation often) to look back at past segments of our lives and get stuck. Or, we look forward to segments of our lives to come that we have no idea what will come our way. Both temptations keep us from living in the present moment, in the immediate segment, and from finding the treasure in the front yard of those present moments and immediate places.
In conclusion, maybe you’ve read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. At one point in her travels, she writes about a friend, who, whenever she saw a beautiful place, blurted out with ecstasy, “It’s so beautiful here! I want to come back here someday!”
Gilbert then wrote, “It takes all my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she is already here.”
And so are you. You are already here, in this present moment, in the present place; this quotidian, daily moment of beauty, awe and wonder, filled with God and what God wants to show you. You don’t need to come back, or wait for it. It’s here. If you see it.
Proverbs 12:28; 14:6; 15:21; 17:24
I first ran into this word, quotidian, while staying in a Benedictine monastery up in NW Missouri for a couple of weeks. I was trying to find a spiritual island upon which I could rest and avoid burnout. I spent a lot of days and late evenings in the stacks of the library there, reading, thinking, praying; mostly slowing down the merry-go-round that had become my life.
One of my favorite authors is Kathleen Norris, a transplanted New York City poet, now living in Lemmon, a tiny town in northern South Dakota. I got to meet her a few years back at the Convocation of the High Plains. Kathleen was one of our main speakers.
I had read all her books, I thought, including her collection of poetry, titled, Little Girls In Church. Her poetry was a lot more provocative than I expected. But there, buried in the stacks of my two week home, that nearly silent monastery, I came across this little book by Kathleen that I’d not heard of before. It had an odd title: The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women’s Work. It was a collection of talks she gave at a seminar at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame. I know what laundry is. And liturgy. And, because I’ve raised two kids pretty much on my own, I have an inkling about women’s work.
But I didn’t know what quotidian meant. It was a new word. I went looking for a dictionary. It simply means, “daily.” Of all the books I took down from the shelves of the Benedictine monastery library, that little one ended up being the most important for me at that time. Kathleen Norris helped me see, again, that there are daily routines and rhythms (simple daily tasks) that don’t seem too important. We might even call them by other names: drudgery, or menial, or more negatively, “donkey work.” But it’s in the donkey work of our daily routines, if our eyes are open, that are infused with holiness and the presence of God.
But we don’t see the quotidian, the every day kinds of routine, as particularly infused with the presence of God. In the book of Ecclesiastes Solomon’s depressive outlook on the world was that everything was a daily round-and-round that made life so awful. He looked at how so much in life occurs and reoccurs each day to the point that he ended up hating life. What his eyes couldn’t or wouldn’t see was how it is in the very dailiness of life that God makes himself known and visible. If God can’t reveal himself in our daily events, then how is God going to make himself known at all.
Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, wanted the big splash event. He wanted something entirely new that stood out from the daily routine. He wanted what Isaiah cried out to God for at one point, “Oh, that you would rip open the sky and come down.” That’s what Solomon wanted. The bright light that would knock him off his horse, like what happened with Paul. The burning bush, like what happened with Moses.
The wisdom of Proverbs, indeed of the whole Bible, is that God is rarely found in those kinds of splashy events that stand outside the boundaries of the dailyness of life. Most of the time, God is bumped into (or God bumps into us) as we are making our way through the everyday recurring routines and places of our lives. We say with Jacob, who spent the night out in the wilderness, using a rock for a pillow, having a dream about angels going up and down on a staircase: “Truly, God is in this place--and I didn’t even know it” (Genesis 28:17). It is when we are going about our daily routines, in our everyday places, not expecting a whole lot that we see God best.
Cynics look high and low for wisdom--and never find it;
The open minded find it right on their doorstep. (Proverbs 14:6)
We could substitute a lot of words in that proverb for the word wisdom. Life. Happiness. Contentment. Or, God. For so many people, wisdom, life, happiness, contentment, even God, is not here. Its got to be somewhere else. Out there. I was talking to a boy at the junior high at lunch one day, when I was working with special ed. kids in Leoti. He asked me why I moved to Leoti, KS. Why would I want to move to a place like Leoti after being in California, was his question. How could I like life here after being some place like California? His view was that I needed (or, more to the point, HE felt he needed) to be someplace else in order for life, happiness, contentment, whatever, to happen. Life was back there for me, according to this 7th grader. Or life was going to be found out there, away from this place.
The problems with that attitude are many. One is that you will never be satisfied. Suppose that boy moved away from Leoti some day. He’s convinced himself that nothing worthwhile is going to happen for him in Leoti. So, let’s say he goes some place else. But he’s already developed eyes that are closed to the ordinary, daily ways that God can make life good where you are at. He will get dissatisfied with the new place. Surely, what he is looking for is still out there some where. And off he goes. The search for life, for God, for whatever, becomes his life, rather than seeing life and God in the ordinary and everyday of where he is at the moment. Even in a place like Leoti.
There is the story of a man who lived in a simple house in a simple village. But he, like my junior high student, became dissatisfied. He thought to himself, as he looked at his wife, and children, and friends and town, that surely there is a better life out there some place else. So he left all that was his, and set out on his search.
At the end of the first day, he was deep in some woods. As he prepared to lie down and sleep, he wanted to make sure he headed in the right direction the next morning. He took off his shoes, and pointed them in the direction he was heading, so he could continue on in the morning. But during the night, another traveler came upon the man, saw the shoes, and pointed them in the opposite direction.
When the man awoke the next morning, refreshed and ready to continue his search for a new place, he put on his shoes and headed off in the direction they were pointing. Soon, he came to a little town with ordinary looking houses and ordinary looking people, and settled in with a familiar looking family, who had familiar looking friends. He said to himself, “Certainly this is a grand place, a better place than I was before.” The thing he desired, the thing he went searching for, was right on his doorstep all the time.
The empty-headed treat life as a plaything;
the perceptive grasp its meaning and make a go of it. (Proverbs 15:21)
Those who treat life as a plaything are also apt to treat God in the same way. That is, those kinds of people try to use life and God, rather than being immersed in life and God. Meaning will never be found by those kinds of people.
Because that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Finding meaning? The quotidian moments can convey not just a grab bag of emotions and sensations, but a sense of wonder, beauty, and peace. Meaning always bushwhacks the mundane. That is, it is in the mundane, tedious, daily routines of our lives that surprisingly and wondrously get ambushed and transformed into moments of holiness and revelation.
Annie Dillard is another favorite author. In her book, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, she wrote of one of these moments where meaning bushwhacked one of her ordinary moments. Pulling into a gas station on an interstate highway in Virginia, she discovered a holy moment in a convergence of mundane events: a simple conversation with the gas station attendant, a free cup of hot coffee, a frisky beagle puppy, and the setting sun’s light performing tricks on an enormous mountain range. She wrote of that quotidian moment:
This is it, I think; this is it, right now. The present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting a puppy, I am watching the mountain.
It doesn’t seem like much, does it. But meaning bushwhacked her mundane moments, and suddenly she felt immersed in life and full of God.
Of course, the nature of these quotidian moments is that you can’t punch an 800 number on your cell phone with one hand, while clutching a VISA card in your other hand, and order such a moment. You can’t pore over your calendar and pencil such a moment in for next Thursday. Much better to sharpen your senses to pay attention for the holy in the daily, recognizing that the fodder for quotidian and God-filled moments of meaning surrounds you.
In this age of frenetic activity and general racket of discordant emotions and voices, this means fighting. Fighting to keep your eyes open, to clear the cobwebs that shroud ears and eyes and souls from sensing. Fighting to sense the breeze through your hair, the sun upon your face, or hearing your friends quirky laugh, or looking up during a nighttime walk at a sky spread with stars like peanut butter. In all that and more, sensing this is it, this is that quotidian moment that gives me peace, that matches my pulse with the pulse of God, that gives me that certain sense of meaning that abides throughout the other 98 percent of life that appears so static, so obvious and so humdrum and unremarkable.
I think there is another aspect to this one proverb about treating life and God as a plaything and missing out on the opportunity to grasp meaning in the here and now, in the present moment. It has to do with cultivating a nonjudgmental awareness of the present. Think how we both consciously and unconsciously judge our present moments and places. I saw that in the junior high boy I mentioned earlier. He was making a value judgement that this present moment and this present place was not important, or is not filled with any kind of possibility. His judgement lead him to a sense of boredom and unfulfillment. This is not my real life. My real life was back when, or yet to come.
As long as we are looking at our quotidian, daily moments and places with a sense of judgement, we will not see what is really and actually here. Our judgmental attitudes only raises our stress, and adds to the shroud that covers our senses to the hand of God in the here and now. Because of judgementalism about our daily moments, we let the present slip away, allowing time to walk by unobserved and unseized, squandering the precious seconds of our lives.
The perceptive find wisdom in their own front yard;
fools look for it everywhere but right here. (Proverbs 17:24)
Once there was a cobbler who lived in a small village doing what he could to get by in his daily routine. One night he had a dream of finding a treasure under a bridge in a certain city. The next morning, he gathered some things together and headed for the city. There he found the bridge from his dream. For days he looked under, and around the bridge to find the treasure. He dug holes; he sorted through piles of trash. Nothing.
After several days of this, he sat dirty and exhausted on the bridge. He was ready to give up. A man standing near by struck up a conversation. The treasure hunter tells about his dream and the treasure. The stranger laughed, and then said, “Just the other night I had a dream of finding a buried treasure beside an old tree stump in the back yard of a cobbler who lived in some small village. But you don’t see me going off, chasing after nonsense that I only saw in a dream.” He laughed again, and walked away.
The cobbler, thinking of the old stump in his back yard, hurried home and dug up the treasure that was right in his own back yard all the time.
The buried treasure that all these proverbs are talking about is our daily, ordinary life. Each quotidian moment, each day, is a treasure waiting to be found, waiting to be recognized. They are treasures because God is in each of those moments, no matter how mundane. In fact, maybe the moments that lack the most interest for us are actually the most God-filled. It’s just a matter of seeing that and living into them.
I was watching an interview with Pat Summitt, the coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. She had won her 1000th game as a coach, more than any other coach in men’s or women’s basketball.
During the interview they filmed her talking to her team during timeouts. At one point she said to her team, “We didn’t do that well in that last segment. We need to rebound better if we are going to do better in the next segment.” Then, after that clip was over, Coach Summitt talked about how she breaks the game down into what she calls segments. Not quarters or halves, but smaller segments of how the flow of the game is going. In one segment they may be shooting well, but then all of a sudden, nothing is dropping, and they are moving into a different segment of the game. She described how she does that for the women on her team so they can stay in the moment of the game, and not think about what happened in the past segments, or what may or may not happen further on in the game.
I thought that was a good idea. When we’re looking at life, and how and when we find most meaning in it, it’s usually in the immediate segment we are living in. It’s in the “right here” as the proverb states. The same is true with how God shows up in our lives. God is the God of the immediate segment, because, when you think about it, that’s all we have. That’s where we live.
We are tempted (and we succumb to the temptation often) to look back at past segments of our lives and get stuck. Or, we look forward to segments of our lives to come that we have no idea what will come our way. Both temptations keep us from living in the present moment, in the immediate segment, and from finding the treasure in the front yard of those present moments and immediate places.
In conclusion, maybe you’ve read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. At one point in her travels, she writes about a friend, who, whenever she saw a beautiful place, blurted out with ecstasy, “It’s so beautiful here! I want to come back here someday!”
Gilbert then wrote, “It takes all my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she is already here.”
And so are you. You are already here, in this present moment, in the present place; this quotidian, daily moment of beauty, awe and wonder, filled with God and what God wants to show you. You don’t need to come back, or wait for it. It’s here. If you see it.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Two Frogs in a Deep Cream Bowl
"Two Frogs in a Deep Cream Bowl"
Proverbs 12:25; 15:13; 17:22
I’m not much of a saver, unless it has to do with some nifty sermon illustration. I have a couple of file boxes full of illustrations and articles I’ve saved over the years. One of those saved items is a Time Magazine cover article from 1984. The story was about the upbeat mood of the American people at that time. Rising up out of the ashes of the Vietnam war, and the Iran hostage fiasco, and just a general negativism, was a more positive American personality and outlook--back in 1984.
Rereading the article, I thought it an interesting comparison to where we are today. We seem to be winding down from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are coming through some really negative economic times--and it’s still not clear when it will get better. Political stalemates over national debt and government spending cuts, along with American corporations unwilling to share their amassed wealth, has made our national personality more cynical, angry, pessimistic and fearful.
As I was rereading the long cover story from the 1984 Time Magazine article, I came across the following statement:
Once ignited, a sense of optimism (like pessimism) can be self-fulfilling: the U.S. has cheered up partly because enough Americans willed such a change. It is the power of positive thinking writ large.
The point the writers were making fell along the lines of the old saying that nothing breeds success like success. Likewise, nothing breeds optimism like optimism.
But everything hinges on the first two words of the quote I just read: “Once ignited…” So the question becomes: how does the mood pendulum swing from the side of pessimism and negativity over to optimism and the positive? How can we move, in the words of the Proverbs, from a sad heart, a broken spirit, and anxiety, to a cheerful face and a joyful heart? How does that ignition of optimism happen, in individuals and larger groups of people--maybe a whole nation?
A sidewalk superintendent was watching three men at work on a construction project. All three were doing the same job--brick work. “What are you doing?” the observer asked the first worker.
“I’m working for $60 a day,” he replied.
“What are you doing?” said the spectator to the second worker.
“I’m just laying bricks,” was the reply.
The same question was asked to the third brick layer, but his reply was, “Why, I’m building a grand cathedral.”
Those three attitudes, those three perspectives of the brick workers seems to me to be what’s at issue. How can we motivate ourselves to a larger, more positive vision, moving from the mundane (“just laying bricks, making $60 a day”) to the notable and meaningful (“building a grand cathedral”)? How does our attitude about who we are, or what we are doing, shape how we approach life? That’s the question.
Proverbs 12:25 reads, “Anxiety in the heart weighs a person down…” But it doesn’t stop there does it? It doesn’t just weigh one person down. The anxiety we feel not only affects us. It ripples out to all who are in our circle of relationships. Anxiety ends up weighing lots of people down, even though it started with one person.
Let’s think of anxiety as a major storm. Often, a major storm is the coming together of smaller storms and conditions, that by themselves, aren’t that destructive. But once combined, those minor storms come together to make the major storm of anxiety.
Sorrow, for example. Ongoing, unresolved grief over someone or some thing lost. Grief and sorrow forces a person to live in the past, rather than seeing the possibilities of the now and the future. Sorrow forces a person to focus only on what could have been, or what should have been, but isn’t. For example, in losing a loved one, you not only lose that person, you also lose companionship, a sense of security, dreams and aspirations for the future, a part of your own identity, or a change in other relationships. So many sorrows get compounded upon each other when we suffer a loss.
Grief and sorrow are like those blinders they put on horses that only make them see a small portion of what’s in front of them. When looking at the expanse of the horizon, a person controlled by sorrow only sees a small portion of that horizon. That’s how grief and sorrow contribute the growing size of anxiety in a person’s life. Because, that’s all they think there is. Anxiety grows larger, as your field of view grows smaller. But what happens when you broaden out the view? What happens when you see there’s more? It’s all, always been there. Increasing anxiety, brought on by sorrow, keeps you from seeing the larger picture of the now. In contrast, enlarging your view of things, decreases anxiety.
Another smaller storm that comes into and creates the larger front of anxiety could be fear. It seems there is more fear these days than anything else. Fear of our whole economic outlook, and that we won’t get our deserved piece of the pie. Fear that a nut case can walk anywhere they want and open fire with an automatic weapon. Fear for our children and grandchildren. Fear about education. Fear about ecological disaster and global warming. And on, and on.
The next time you watch or read the news, make a note about how much of what is reported has to do with fear, and generating fear. I couldn’t believe how much of President Obama’s and Speaker of the House Boehner’s speeches this past Monday night were laced with fear tactics. Why do our national leaders in both parties only try to make their points by elevating our anxiety, rather than find creative ways to assuage anxiety?
The main power behind fear is the attitude that something is going to go horribly wrong. Fear causes us to constantly look suspiciously over our shoulder. Fear erodes our trust in each other. Fear freezes a person, and those around them, from enjoying what is. Instead, the focus is on, “What if something bad happens?” Without entertaining the opposite, “What if something really good happens?”
Another storm along the larger front of anxiety is this certain uneasiness, apprehension and worry that turns into depression. Depression is one of the modern cripplers of the individual spirit. If all the anti-depressant medication commercials are an indication, we seem to be in an epidemic of depression in this country. Depression totally takes away a person’s present moments. Nothing looks good, now.
Notice, that at the heart of all the storms that are breaking out along the front of anxiety, the recurring theme is being unable to live in the now. There is a certain restlessness with the present, whether that be the present times, the present state of affairs economically and politically, your present marriage, or present job, your present emotions--what ever. The constantly anxious person does not feel the freedom to enjoy the now, even though it may not be perfect.
Do you remember the Funky Winkerbean comic strip? Is it still going on? I pulled one out of the file that fits in here. It’s a conversation between two leaves out on the end of a branch. The larger leaf says to the smaller one, “Well, the first hint of Fall is in the air! We were born in the gentle warmth of Spring, shared in the glory of the blazing summer sun, and now quietly fall before the cold dark winter.”
The smaller leaf turns to the larger one, fully shaken up. “What!? That’s it!? Four lousy, stinking months?!!”
Anxiety certainly gets ramped up when we look at what we have, and then think we should have something more, better, or different. In that anxious shock, we quickly lose sight of what we do have that is affirming, good, and beneficial.
Think about the events and situations in your life that are anxiety producing; that have potential to break the spirit, dry up your bones and weigh you down. Isn’t it interesting that the same circumstances can produce opposite results in two different people? What makes the difference? These proverbs are telling us that the attitude of the heart tremendously affects our physical well-being.
Norman Cousins, author of the once bestselling book, An Anatomy of an Illness, was told he had cancer. At the time he was a successful author, lecturer, and magazine editor. He didn’t have time to slow down. So he decided to cure himself. How? By laughing. He would spend hours reading joke books, watching old Laurel and Hardy, or W.C. Fields movies. He was convinced that his continual positive and upbeat mood, spurred by laughing, totally effected his cure.
Joy in the heart, and a cheered up spirit leads to health, physically and mentally, and especially spiritually. But sadness and anxiety can lead to physical deterioration. Anxious people, statistically, end up dealing with much more physical illness than do low anxiety people. In the book of Sirach (which is one of those books in the Apocrypha that we don’t recognized in our protestant Bibles), the recurring theme is that one means to preserve health is to hold fast to a cheerful disposition and to avoid those things which make cheerfulness impossible.
Sometimes that kind of avoidance only takes a little change of perspective on our part. For example, there’s the story of the young boy talking to himself as he strutted through the backyard. Baseball cap from his favorite team firmly planted on his head. Bat leaning on his shoulder. Baseball being tossed up and down in his hand. He was saying to himself, “I’m the greatest baseball hitter in the world!” Then he tossed the ball into the air, swung at it and missed. “Strike one!” he shouted like an ump.
Undaunted, he picked up the ball, threw it into the air and said to himself, “I’m the greatest hitter in baseball ever!” He took the swing again, and missed. “Strike two!” he shouted. He paused a moment to examine his bat and ball. Then a third time he threw the ball into the air. “I’m the greatest hitter who ever lived!” He swung the bat hard again, but missed for the third time. He cried out, “Wow! Strike three! What a pitcher! I’m the greatest pitcher in baseball!”
The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, have a lot to do with whether we are positive, upbeat people, or not.
In changing people’s negatives into positives, Jesus used different approaches. In some instances he took care of the immediate need of the person. That way they could be freed up to see new possibilities for living. That’s what he was doing when he healed people.
One example of this is the man who sat beside the pool of Bethesda for 38 years. He was waiting to be healed of his infirmity by the water, which was supposedly inhabited by an angel. Here we have the picture of a man who, for 38 years (and back in those times, that was a whole lifetime), nursed his misery, blinded by the dark cloud he had hung over himself.
In the process he had alienated everyone else. He told Jesus, “I have no one to help me into the pool.” Even the others, each in their own misery, sitting around this supposedly angel stirred water, couldn’t take the man’s negativism. And then Jesus asked him the penetrating question: “Do you want to get well?”
Some people don’t. Their gloom encases them like a puncture proof bubble. No matter how much good news they hear, they are determined to see the sour side of life. These kinds of people remind me of the story I read about the waitress who couldn’t get a smile out of her customer for love nor money. The diner was dour, depressed, and dejected all through her meal. As the lady paid her bill and was leaving, the waitress called out, “Have a nice day!” To which the patron snapped, “I’m sorry, but I’ve made other plans.”
Some people have “made other plans” most of their lives. They have made a choice to live scratchy, caustic lives, and they won’t let anyone deter them from their plan.
To the man at the pool of Bethesda, who had made other plans for 38 years, Jesus said, “Be healed.” All at once, his past has been erased and a new future was opened up. The story he had written for himself was no longer relevant, and a new, empty book had been given him to begin writing anew. Jesus freed the man to live in the now.
To others, like the Pharisees in Matthew 23, Jesus said in so many words, “Wake up! You have a bad attitude, and it’s contagious.”
For Jesus, and for our proverbs, the seat of the cure and the restoration of a positive outlook is in the heart. It’s what’s inside that affects the outward appearance and action. A person’s demeanor reveals much about their interior state. The feelings of sorrow, fear, worry, tension, and inadequacy, that emanate from the heart of a person, is etched on your face, or posture.
The weight of our Proverbs and the dealings of Jesus with people seems to indicate that we are in charge of our own attitudes. We determine what’s in our heart. It’s one of those areas that God has left up to us and our free will. It is one of those pieces of what it means to be human that no one can completely help us with. Like the Time magazine article I quoted at the start, our positive attitude has to be “ignited.” Jesus, to the man at the pool of Bethesda was saying, “I can ignite that spark in your heart if you want; but you have to want it. I’m not going to force it one you. Do you want to be well?”
So, it’s a choice that will not be deterred by outward circumstance. That ignited positivity, that new heart, effects us individually, and then collectively with those around us. We, ourselves, choose whether we want to be a person with a heavy heart, weighing others down. Or, if we will be of positive attitude, a person who infects others with the same optimistic medicine.
I close with a poem I’m sure some of you have already heard, “Two Frogs:”
Two frogs fell in a deep cream bowl,
one was an optimistic soul;
But the other took the gloomy view,
“I shall drown,” he cried, “and so shall you.”
So with a last despairing cry,
He closed his eyes and said, “Goodbye.”
But the other frog, with a merry grin
Said, “I can’t get out, but I won’t give in.”
“I’ll swim around till my strength is spent.
For having tried, I’ll die content.”
Bravely he swam until, it would seem
His struggles began to churn the cream.
On the top of the butter at last he stopped
And out of the bowl he happily hopped.
What is the moral? It’s easily found.
If you can’t get out--keep swimming around.
Proverbs 12:25; 15:13; 17:22
I’m not much of a saver, unless it has to do with some nifty sermon illustration. I have a couple of file boxes full of illustrations and articles I’ve saved over the years. One of those saved items is a Time Magazine cover article from 1984. The story was about the upbeat mood of the American people at that time. Rising up out of the ashes of the Vietnam war, and the Iran hostage fiasco, and just a general negativism, was a more positive American personality and outlook--back in 1984.
Rereading the article, I thought it an interesting comparison to where we are today. We seem to be winding down from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are coming through some really negative economic times--and it’s still not clear when it will get better. Political stalemates over national debt and government spending cuts, along with American corporations unwilling to share their amassed wealth, has made our national personality more cynical, angry, pessimistic and fearful.
As I was rereading the long cover story from the 1984 Time Magazine article, I came across the following statement:
Once ignited, a sense of optimism (like pessimism) can be self-fulfilling: the U.S. has cheered up partly because enough Americans willed such a change. It is the power of positive thinking writ large.
The point the writers were making fell along the lines of the old saying that nothing breeds success like success. Likewise, nothing breeds optimism like optimism.
But everything hinges on the first two words of the quote I just read: “Once ignited…” So the question becomes: how does the mood pendulum swing from the side of pessimism and negativity over to optimism and the positive? How can we move, in the words of the Proverbs, from a sad heart, a broken spirit, and anxiety, to a cheerful face and a joyful heart? How does that ignition of optimism happen, in individuals and larger groups of people--maybe a whole nation?
A sidewalk superintendent was watching three men at work on a construction project. All three were doing the same job--brick work. “What are you doing?” the observer asked the first worker.
“I’m working for $60 a day,” he replied.
“What are you doing?” said the spectator to the second worker.
“I’m just laying bricks,” was the reply.
The same question was asked to the third brick layer, but his reply was, “Why, I’m building a grand cathedral.”
Those three attitudes, those three perspectives of the brick workers seems to me to be what’s at issue. How can we motivate ourselves to a larger, more positive vision, moving from the mundane (“just laying bricks, making $60 a day”) to the notable and meaningful (“building a grand cathedral”)? How does our attitude about who we are, or what we are doing, shape how we approach life? That’s the question.
Proverbs 12:25 reads, “Anxiety in the heart weighs a person down…” But it doesn’t stop there does it? It doesn’t just weigh one person down. The anxiety we feel not only affects us. It ripples out to all who are in our circle of relationships. Anxiety ends up weighing lots of people down, even though it started with one person.
Let’s think of anxiety as a major storm. Often, a major storm is the coming together of smaller storms and conditions, that by themselves, aren’t that destructive. But once combined, those minor storms come together to make the major storm of anxiety.
Sorrow, for example. Ongoing, unresolved grief over someone or some thing lost. Grief and sorrow forces a person to live in the past, rather than seeing the possibilities of the now and the future. Sorrow forces a person to focus only on what could have been, or what should have been, but isn’t. For example, in losing a loved one, you not only lose that person, you also lose companionship, a sense of security, dreams and aspirations for the future, a part of your own identity, or a change in other relationships. So many sorrows get compounded upon each other when we suffer a loss.
Grief and sorrow are like those blinders they put on horses that only make them see a small portion of what’s in front of them. When looking at the expanse of the horizon, a person controlled by sorrow only sees a small portion of that horizon. That’s how grief and sorrow contribute the growing size of anxiety in a person’s life. Because, that’s all they think there is. Anxiety grows larger, as your field of view grows smaller. But what happens when you broaden out the view? What happens when you see there’s more? It’s all, always been there. Increasing anxiety, brought on by sorrow, keeps you from seeing the larger picture of the now. In contrast, enlarging your view of things, decreases anxiety.
Another smaller storm that comes into and creates the larger front of anxiety could be fear. It seems there is more fear these days than anything else. Fear of our whole economic outlook, and that we won’t get our deserved piece of the pie. Fear that a nut case can walk anywhere they want and open fire with an automatic weapon. Fear for our children and grandchildren. Fear about education. Fear about ecological disaster and global warming. And on, and on.
The next time you watch or read the news, make a note about how much of what is reported has to do with fear, and generating fear. I couldn’t believe how much of President Obama’s and Speaker of the House Boehner’s speeches this past Monday night were laced with fear tactics. Why do our national leaders in both parties only try to make their points by elevating our anxiety, rather than find creative ways to assuage anxiety?
The main power behind fear is the attitude that something is going to go horribly wrong. Fear causes us to constantly look suspiciously over our shoulder. Fear erodes our trust in each other. Fear freezes a person, and those around them, from enjoying what is. Instead, the focus is on, “What if something bad happens?” Without entertaining the opposite, “What if something really good happens?”
Another storm along the larger front of anxiety is this certain uneasiness, apprehension and worry that turns into depression. Depression is one of the modern cripplers of the individual spirit. If all the anti-depressant medication commercials are an indication, we seem to be in an epidemic of depression in this country. Depression totally takes away a person’s present moments. Nothing looks good, now.
Notice, that at the heart of all the storms that are breaking out along the front of anxiety, the recurring theme is being unable to live in the now. There is a certain restlessness with the present, whether that be the present times, the present state of affairs economically and politically, your present marriage, or present job, your present emotions--what ever. The constantly anxious person does not feel the freedom to enjoy the now, even though it may not be perfect.
Do you remember the Funky Winkerbean comic strip? Is it still going on? I pulled one out of the file that fits in here. It’s a conversation between two leaves out on the end of a branch. The larger leaf says to the smaller one, “Well, the first hint of Fall is in the air! We were born in the gentle warmth of Spring, shared in the glory of the blazing summer sun, and now quietly fall before the cold dark winter.”
The smaller leaf turns to the larger one, fully shaken up. “What!? That’s it!? Four lousy, stinking months?!!”
Anxiety certainly gets ramped up when we look at what we have, and then think we should have something more, better, or different. In that anxious shock, we quickly lose sight of what we do have that is affirming, good, and beneficial.
Think about the events and situations in your life that are anxiety producing; that have potential to break the spirit, dry up your bones and weigh you down. Isn’t it interesting that the same circumstances can produce opposite results in two different people? What makes the difference? These proverbs are telling us that the attitude of the heart tremendously affects our physical well-being.
Norman Cousins, author of the once bestselling book, An Anatomy of an Illness, was told he had cancer. At the time he was a successful author, lecturer, and magazine editor. He didn’t have time to slow down. So he decided to cure himself. How? By laughing. He would spend hours reading joke books, watching old Laurel and Hardy, or W.C. Fields movies. He was convinced that his continual positive and upbeat mood, spurred by laughing, totally effected his cure.
Joy in the heart, and a cheered up spirit leads to health, physically and mentally, and especially spiritually. But sadness and anxiety can lead to physical deterioration. Anxious people, statistically, end up dealing with much more physical illness than do low anxiety people. In the book of Sirach (which is one of those books in the Apocrypha that we don’t recognized in our protestant Bibles), the recurring theme is that one means to preserve health is to hold fast to a cheerful disposition and to avoid those things which make cheerfulness impossible.
Sometimes that kind of avoidance only takes a little change of perspective on our part. For example, there’s the story of the young boy talking to himself as he strutted through the backyard. Baseball cap from his favorite team firmly planted on his head. Bat leaning on his shoulder. Baseball being tossed up and down in his hand. He was saying to himself, “I’m the greatest baseball hitter in the world!” Then he tossed the ball into the air, swung at it and missed. “Strike one!” he shouted like an ump.
Undaunted, he picked up the ball, threw it into the air and said to himself, “I’m the greatest hitter in baseball ever!” He took the swing again, and missed. “Strike two!” he shouted. He paused a moment to examine his bat and ball. Then a third time he threw the ball into the air. “I’m the greatest hitter who ever lived!” He swung the bat hard again, but missed for the third time. He cried out, “Wow! Strike three! What a pitcher! I’m the greatest pitcher in baseball!”
The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, have a lot to do with whether we are positive, upbeat people, or not.
In changing people’s negatives into positives, Jesus used different approaches. In some instances he took care of the immediate need of the person. That way they could be freed up to see new possibilities for living. That’s what he was doing when he healed people.
One example of this is the man who sat beside the pool of Bethesda for 38 years. He was waiting to be healed of his infirmity by the water, which was supposedly inhabited by an angel. Here we have the picture of a man who, for 38 years (and back in those times, that was a whole lifetime), nursed his misery, blinded by the dark cloud he had hung over himself.
In the process he had alienated everyone else. He told Jesus, “I have no one to help me into the pool.” Even the others, each in their own misery, sitting around this supposedly angel stirred water, couldn’t take the man’s negativism. And then Jesus asked him the penetrating question: “Do you want to get well?”
Some people don’t. Their gloom encases them like a puncture proof bubble. No matter how much good news they hear, they are determined to see the sour side of life. These kinds of people remind me of the story I read about the waitress who couldn’t get a smile out of her customer for love nor money. The diner was dour, depressed, and dejected all through her meal. As the lady paid her bill and was leaving, the waitress called out, “Have a nice day!” To which the patron snapped, “I’m sorry, but I’ve made other plans.”
Some people have “made other plans” most of their lives. They have made a choice to live scratchy, caustic lives, and they won’t let anyone deter them from their plan.
To the man at the pool of Bethesda, who had made other plans for 38 years, Jesus said, “Be healed.” All at once, his past has been erased and a new future was opened up. The story he had written for himself was no longer relevant, and a new, empty book had been given him to begin writing anew. Jesus freed the man to live in the now.
To others, like the Pharisees in Matthew 23, Jesus said in so many words, “Wake up! You have a bad attitude, and it’s contagious.”
For Jesus, and for our proverbs, the seat of the cure and the restoration of a positive outlook is in the heart. It’s what’s inside that affects the outward appearance and action. A person’s demeanor reveals much about their interior state. The feelings of sorrow, fear, worry, tension, and inadequacy, that emanate from the heart of a person, is etched on your face, or posture.
The weight of our Proverbs and the dealings of Jesus with people seems to indicate that we are in charge of our own attitudes. We determine what’s in our heart. It’s one of those areas that God has left up to us and our free will. It is one of those pieces of what it means to be human that no one can completely help us with. Like the Time magazine article I quoted at the start, our positive attitude has to be “ignited.” Jesus, to the man at the pool of Bethesda was saying, “I can ignite that spark in your heart if you want; but you have to want it. I’m not going to force it one you. Do you want to be well?”
So, it’s a choice that will not be deterred by outward circumstance. That ignited positivity, that new heart, effects us individually, and then collectively with those around us. We, ourselves, choose whether we want to be a person with a heavy heart, weighing others down. Or, if we will be of positive attitude, a person who infects others with the same optimistic medicine.
I close with a poem I’m sure some of you have already heard, “Two Frogs:”
Two frogs fell in a deep cream bowl,
one was an optimistic soul;
But the other took the gloomy view,
“I shall drown,” he cried, “and so shall you.”
So with a last despairing cry,
He closed his eyes and said, “Goodbye.”
But the other frog, with a merry grin
Said, “I can’t get out, but I won’t give in.”
“I’ll swim around till my strength is spent.
For having tried, I’ll die content.”
Bravely he swam until, it would seem
His struggles began to churn the cream.
On the top of the butter at last he stopped
And out of the bowl he happily hopped.
What is the moral? It’s easily found.
If you can’t get out--keep swimming around.
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