Wants And Needs

If we had all we wanted, we wouldn't have what we really needed. God always gives us what we need, not always what we want.

Since Elections Are So Close To Halloween, Here's Something Scary

I strongly suspect that those who would spend 30 minutes decrying Federal corruption and bureaucracy wouldn't spend 30 seconds on Google looking up who's on their local school board. If there was ever a weak point in democracy, this is it.

Thanks, Mike Rosen, for your thought-provoking commentary.

Twitty Observation

I'm a twit. My heart is a-twitter. There really is no good way to say that I'm tweeting lately. My latest tweet was actually quite good, but not fully developed. It should have said, "If I live by the pen, and the pen is mightier than the sword, then if those who live by the sword also die by the sword, then am I living dangerously?" Yikes! It's the attack of the aphorisms! Maybe I should wear my pithy helmet before I tweet.

I don't even know if the tweet has a logical conclusion. It's one of the dangers of twitter. You start off with the notion, develop the thought and by the time you've put half of it into the twitter box, it's a blinkin' blog post. One of my followers said it best when she said that to be a successful twitter-er, you have to be succinct, which--she says--she is not.

Ditto... I think.

Tiger Balm, Tolkien and Taking A Little Off The Top

I know. I know I haven't published anything in close to 10 days (10!) but I've been writing--oh, I've been writing! In my mind, more than anything, actually, because I can't sit at the keys. Something about this weather lately has been kicking me back and forth from the bed to the bathroom to the den, right past the keys, and straight underneath warm blankets that smell of Tiger Balm, Ben Gay and Green Tea, much like I do, I'm afraid.

I have been reading Tolkien again, and like a chameleon, I take on the voice of the author in my thoughts and my writing. Terrible thing, really. Talking in half sentences like this. Dangling participles over capricious phrases, writing like this can be a chore.

Why am I reading Tolkien? Well, I made the kids a promise. Sarah (12) and Bubba (9) are approaching the age where their peers are asking them "You haven't seen The Lord of the Rings?" Like they're asking them if they still suck their thumbs. So, I turned to them one evening and told them, "If you can read through the books, you're ready to watch the movies." Ha! I thought, This will be fun. Bubba will bog down in the Council of Elrond. Everyone does. He'll get discouraged and pick it up again when he's ready.

He's on page 210 of the Two Towers, far outpacing his sister! Aigh!

As a result, we just watched the first hour of the Special, Extended, Super-Colossal, And-You-Thought-The-Books-Were-Long Edition DVD of the Fellowship of the Ring. They are eating it up! And this even after I showed them the long segments on Tolkien and how they adapted the book to the movie, which are really helpful for people who read the books. It seems they're the ones that get steamed about Tom Bombadil only showing up on milk cartons--"Have you seen me?"--on Hobbit first-breakfast tables.

Anyway, I've been writing. I have an open letter to my son that I plan to put up soon, if I can get around to editing it. It's all about relationships, but I won't tip my hand too much. I also have something about skiing, but I don't want to drag anyone through that's not willing, so I'll give fair warning in the title. Nothing like getting snow in you keyboard from an errant skier.

So I'll close with a quick observation in a field I am mostly inexperienced at analyzing, politics. Never has our fair Republic been in greater danger of falling to the wolves. The center of political power in America, Congress has already purchased--ipso facto--the banks of our nation with their bailout. They are now calling their erstwhile managers to account for the money. Does anyone else think this a little... well, what's the word... incredible? Here we have an entity so incapable of fiscal responsibility, it took them years to discover that the House checking accounts were a little overdrawn. There's only one thing worse than Congress ousting the Golden Circle of Bank Presidents and their cadre, and that is Congress letting them stay in power. So where's the danger? If things get worse under a liberal President and a liberal Congress, the state of our societal morals tells me that we will have a French Revolution, not an American one, looking us straight in the eyes.

Small-time Observation: The thing about history is that you have so many years to think about other people's mistakes and the thing about the present is that you have so little time to fix your own.

Random Thoughts About "Falling Back"

I never "fall back," but I do "spring forward." I've saved so much time, I might never die.

I asked the bank what I should do with extra daylight savings and they told me to put it where the sun doesn't shine. I thought it sounded like a good idea too.

Arizona is saving year 'round now. I guess they don't trust their daylight banks like we do here.

I made a withdrawal once from my DS Bank, but I tripped out in the parking lot. Let's just say a few people got to work on their tans due to my generosity. I betcha that dermatologist across the way gets a lot of local business.

Of course, all this saving doesn't help my financial situation, but it does help me tip folks. I tell them, here's a little sunshine for you, and then I let them have it. People are usually happier for it. Except that albino. He wasn't impressed, or happy.

Encouraging Defection

A lot of folks are talking about Expelled from Ben Stein. As if liberals were the only ones who could make a documentary. I haven't yet seen it, but I've followed Stein for years and I know that Bueller Bueller boy is right on course.

The frustrating thing is that the establishment will not admit Darwin's theory of macro-evolution is a bunch of hopeless fiction. They will not admit an error, for fear that the Pope will knock on their door with a writ and a warm spot by the fire picked out for them. They won't even say they don't know. Rather than admit there is a Designer, I believe that most neo-Darwinists would claim a sweater as correctly tangled yarn. Um, guys, you can come out now. It's okay to say Darwin was a little off and that Sagan seems creepy even in reruns on the Science channel. If the inquisitor of dogmatic Science taps you on the shoulder, you'll be in good company.

Who Is This 'God' Fellow, Anyway?

The nice thing about blogging is that even if you run out of things to say, life keeps happening and you can still have small thoughts about the in-between stuff.

I looked in the mirror the other day. I'm 34 years-old by the way, soon to be 35 and halfway to 70. I'm about mid-way through life, I figure, so why doesn't this mark "middle age?" Anyway, I took comfort in a small, little-known secret to happiness in the later years that you can comb your eyebrows to cover any bald spots that open up on your hair line. If you can't grow them long enough, it still might work if you transfer some hair plugs from your ears. Why they don't advertise this as an option on those hair club infomercials is a mystery to me.

I've been receiving more than the usual amount of hate mail lately. One "anonymous coward" even had the timerity to suggest that God cursed me with my disabilities because of my stance on a specific issue. Could anyone actually believe that God would be that petty or vindictive? That kind of single-issue god fits right in with those soldier funeral protestors. Oh well, I guess I'll just trust that those who seek God with all their heart will find Him. It's not up to me to fix people, just offer the truth.

All of this sounds ridiculously small when I consider the news that two very good missionary friends of mine unexpectedly lost their infant son last Thursday. As is the case with severe grief, they're understandably out of contact and my wife and I have knots in our guts over what they're going through. They are really neat people with a heart for God and somehow they lose their only son after three daughters. As a dad, that gets me especially. As a father, having a son is like reliving your life, exposing them to all the new and wonderful things like ice cream and football, exploring and building, and all the cool things of being a boy, including getting enough courage up to go down the really big slide at the playground. It's no longer available to my friend and I'm grieving with him. How do you even begin to grasp that kind of loss? Where do you begin to breathe again after this awful plunge? I wish I was asking these questions for the first time or even the second, but I'm not.

My niece is staying with us again. She's had the umpteenth surgery to try to save her eyesight from detached retina damage. It could be that there's just no way of keeping that from happening. She and I can kind of relate to each other in our disabilities. She has no peripheral vision now, which is really harder to cope with than you would think. People accidentally sneak up on her and startle her. They just don't think to give her a clue that they're nearby. I'm as guilty as the next person at this.

Right now, she has to keep her head at a certain angle to keep the "bubble" that doctors left in her eye at the right spot to keep the right pressure on the spot they just repaired. If I did something wrong and that brought on my disabilities, what did she do to bring on hers? It reminds me of the story about Jesus and the man who had been born blind. "Lord, who sinned, this man or his parents?" "Neither," He replied, "He was born blind so that God's glory could be revealed in him." Then Jesus healed him. God doesn't ask us if we're willing to go through the 30 years or so of total darkness for His glory. No one talks about the glorious blindness we endure until then. We focus on the "once blind but now sighted," instead of the "blind for years until Jesus came along." I guess it's a matter of perspective, so to speak, but it's not all that fun being blind, or lame. Like Job, I'm not really in a position to criticize God. He does what He wants, when He wants to, for His own reasons. He's the only One Who truly can do so, and if only for that, He deserves my worship.

Yet, this is not all. This God also sings over me, and counting my hairs, a task that's getting easier. He takes an active role in working for my good. He knows everything about me better than I know me. That the infinite God of the universe is interested in finite little me brings me comfort. I can trust Him, even when life is bitter. He knows what will be for our eternal good and gives good gifts to His children.

Living In Christ

A fellow blogger posted about learning about God's love, and I left a comment that I thought would be a good statement about my faith these days.

The more I live in Christ, the more I realize how much it all relates back to that sacrifice of love on the cross and the Man Who made it for us. The deeper I go into my faith in Him, the more I understand about His love for me. It is no longer about gaining understanding or pursuing knowledge about God. Instead it’s about letting Him do what He wants with me and letting Him reveal Himself, Who He is as my provider, my shield, my comfort, my strength and my deliverer. The more He leads me through the wilderness, the more I depend on Him. I trust Him in those moments because of His love and His sacrifice for me. I am His child, bought with a price. That is one thing that affects me every day of my life.

The Miracle of Modern Homeschooling

The miracle of modern homeschooling is not that the product is academically superior. The miracle is that parents are discovering their children and finding they can provide their child with a moral context for the academic education. The majority of parents find their goal grows from providing a better education for their child to producing a whole adult who is ready to assume their role in society.

Polaroid Closes Its Chemical Plants

It is the end of an era. Polaroid has stopped making film.

When I was 12, I was mesmerized by the magic of watching a small square blank slowly but clearly develop into a picture. Now there is a camera in a phone, a camera in a laptop, a camera that records you buying gasoline and a camera that records you walking into work or past a school. There are not enough eyes for the cameras we own, and they all work much faster and better than a Polaroid.

Because of the capitalist model, this glut of cameras probably says more about our culture than we'd like to admit. We are obsessed with image. We judge by appearances because there's no time to examine what is really going on before we move on to the next frame, the next image. One photo can ruin a career or make one, and it makes no regard for the humanity of the subject matter.

Eggs

I enjoy eggs as much as the next person--perhaps a bit more, but I am honestly at a loss to explain the first person to look at something that came from the south end of a chicken and say, "Mmm, that looks tasty!"