A little More Navel Gazing

I would like to thank all of you who committed on my last blog (and those who read and chose not to comment or to point out my errors.)

I don't think I am going though "Midlife Crisis Part II." FD, I am guessing, hopes not. Following my last one I married her and even thought she likes the HBO program "Big Love" I am not sure she would want a sister/wife :) But I am feel adrift.

My job, which on the whole I like, has lately been fuzzy. Not sure what my job is now. New boss seem to want to do what my job has been and at the same time I feel like I am making "boss" decisions to keep thing moving at work.

I don't want the "boss" job. I do not have the credentials to do the job and fund raising is not my passion, I can do it but it was not what I was hired to do. Boss wants to do what he perceives as the glamor part of my job, flying half around the world for a two day meeting. That to me is not glamor but a week of unsettled sleep.

The hardest part at work right know is that there is an expectation of fawning over everything he does. I know - I know it speaks more to his insecurity than anything else and I don't mind giving praise when it is a natural response and as a pastor I look for thing to help people to see God at work in their lives but I an not "The Pastor" in my job here, I do not want to spend time noticing every little thing my boss does and praise him for his brilliance in booking a flight (because he has just told me how great a job he has done)!

That said, my understand of leadership is that troubles flow up and praise flow down.

Maybe it is my stoic Presbyterian outlook, but when I do something well, as long as I know it (and if I do God knew before I did) it does not matter if anyone else notices. Anyway doing things well is what is expected, praise should not be expected.

I also think giving praise is like giving presents, giving is a whole lot more fun than receiving.

The only time when giving praises and gifts are not fun is when they are expected or preserved to be deserved.

I guess this goes back to my understand of salvation. Salvation is only salvation when it is unexpected and undeserved.

Long Time No Write

I have not posted here for some time. Not sure why, but it could be:

• I have nothing to say (unlikely if you know me)
• Have a very hard time blogging from home
• I work at computer for 6 hours a day and don't want to face a key board
• To tired to type
• To busy with son
• Too many books to read

I think the real reason is that all my life writing has been a source of pain. It is not that my fingers hurt (but I am getting some Arthur). It is emotional pain and how I see myself.

Because of learning problems (the labels have changed with time but I still have the same problems, phonically illiterate, what is know called "ADD," distressingly acute hearing and horrible rote memory.) I have almost a phobia about writing. I know that no matter what I write, how good the content, how accurate the information is, The first thing people say to me is "you miss spelled ____" -"you used a comma wrong" -"That is not a sentence."

It was okay if the person was teacher but as an adult everyone thinks they have a write to commit on my flaws in writing. I don't comment on what ever flaw they have why is it okay for you to point out mine. Is it because they have proof of my flaw, it on paper and it can be saved and referred to. It is hard to capture bad breath or arrogance. An arrogant person may not understand arrogance is a flaw to begin with.

I want to say get past the form and get the idea of the message behind it. Maybe one of the reasons I like Kierkegaard is that in the English translation, the meaning gets thought if you forget the structure of the writing.

About the time I stopped blogging was when I realized how often my new boss was amused at my minor writing errors. I learned a long time ago that some one has to proofread my stuff to add the things my fast moving - addled brain miss when I edit my own writing.

I have to write, a lot every day, it has gotten harder and harder to set myself to the task.

Starting today when I blog I will:

• I will not worry about having to be perfect in my post.
• I will use the spell check and look up words I have misspelled so badly the sell check can't come up with a correct spelling
• I will leave alone words that are spelled correctly but look wrong
• I will not let the grammar and spelling police make me feel like a seven year old who can not memorize the spelling list and told adnauseam "sound it out"(If I could sound it out I would have, you have told me this for the hundredth time, STOP)

By the way adnauseam is not in blogger's spell check. I spelled it correctly but I still had to look it up because the spell check could not figure it out!

If you are reading this and have tendency be part of the grammar and spelling police.

Pretend that I am writing in Danish and that has been translated into English.

Middle Aged and Out to Eat

As a child I remember going out to dinner and sitting in the booth or at the table and watching the other people who were eating dinner. I am not talking about the 2 year old staring at the guy cleaning his false teeth. I am talking about just seeing and observing "normal" people eating dinner.

I would sit and wonder who they were and why the groups of people were together. I was looking at them as a mix of adults and children or just a group of adults. What I would try to figure out was what the relationships was between people. Most often I figured that the were a group of friends out with their family. It did not cross my mind that they were brothers and sisters spending time together. I also remember feeling sad watching people eating alone, I still do.

Growing up we did not do that kind of things with family. The one time I remember eating out with extended family, and I was not even there! It was the time my youngest sister was out to dinner with my other sister, mother, and "famous" great uncle and her getting sick at the table.

My father's brother and sister were 20 years older than him and we never or rarely got together with them for meals let alone going out to eat. My mother was an only child and did thing rarely with her cousins.

It never occurred to me that those "old"people could be brothers and sister enjoying time together.

It occurred to me this last Saturday night that I was one of those "old" people and the people I choose to eat out with are my sisters and their families. I was reminded of those time as a child looking around and wondering who those people were. I also realized that I truly enjoy the company of my sisters and their families. I think I knew this before but on Saturday it became embedded in me in a way I have not felt a truth in a long time.

I could not help but wonder what Son was thinking as he observed our table and the other tables. All I know is that I still watch the world around me and try to figure out the relationship are between people. I felt like I did as a child.

I guess that is why it hit me that we were one of those a groups of people eating out I remember as a child and I still felt like I should be sitting in my child seat watching and wondering.

What Does it Matter?

The recent media splash of "Is it Jesus' tomb" is much to do about nothing. I have never understood the need to prove Jesus existed by scientific method. My faith in Jesus as the risen Son of God is not dependent on rigid fact. As a matter of fact, if everything is proven about Jesus faith is no longer faith. It becomes a human bound ridged ritual.

For me, by definition faith is belief in realities that can not be proven by the limits of human nature. The human need to know everything about God within the limits of our limited sense of reality and in turn making a small God, is an attempt to displace the one God with a human god of the self.

If I remember correctly there are a number of stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis that speak to the human desire to control God and to become god. The truth and reality of God is our inability to understand God, to have someone greater that the self to trust.

One of the many sad parts of the "tomb of Jesus media event" is that the people that are recruited to speak for "people of faith" by the media are as rigid and ridiculous as the people who are trying to present reality as they see it.

The blow hard that was on Larry King last night has done more to drive people away from faith than any empirical evidence given by the film makers. If there was ever a person that represent what a "christian" is not to be like it would be this guy. I have seen him on a number of shows but I have been outraged and embarrassed by what he says that I can never remember his name.

I know that media want caustic and irrational guests to bump up ratings and a level headed thinking Christian does not make good TV.

In the end I matters not what someone digs out of the ground or spews on TV, as Paul wrote, Love (God) bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all thinks. Love (God) never ends.

In this world today a person has to believe this because there is no prof that God is and I don't want any.

Winter Funk

Every year I become very grumpy from about the middle of January to the middle of February. The problem is, particularly for Wife, is that I don't remember this happens every year until about the middle of February.

Two nights ago the realization of my annual grumpiness occurred to me as if it was new information. I have internally blamed it on a number of thing:

• Started getting meds by mail and one of my meds is a generic instead of name brand I had been taking. (did not know there was genetic available until it arrived in the mail)


• The many piles of paper at work that need to be addressed but I keep getting new work assignments which means routine work gets put off and piled up.


• Started working out at gym three times a week.


• Stress at church, over resistance to welcoming new members. Actually reaching out instead of expecting them to walk in the door at a church five mile from nearest highway and 1/4 mile from nearest house.

But in the end it is just the February funk. Realizing that it is what it is makes it some strange way go away.

A Second Scoop of Coal

The heat is not working in the office today and I feel like Bob Cratchit. My hands are cold and I am thinking about cutting the tips of my glove fingers off to be a able to warm my hands and still do my work. I am huddled by a space heater working on reviewing self-studies and making travel arraignments. All I need is a waist coat and a bottle of ink and I could be in the mid-19th century.

Just think I was in New Orleans two days ago in 70 degree weather eating "King Cake." I got the piece with the baby in it both times I eat a piece. I now owe them two cakes.

Got a tour of New Orleans it still looks like they got coal in their stocking this year.

Molly Ivins

On the way to work today I heard that Molly Ivins died. A sadness came over me. I was sadder that I would have imagines about someone I had only heard and read. I heard a report of her death on the way home and had the same feeling. I heard her voice in an interview and was with the feeling in the chest and everything.

I took my pills this morning, I did. I shouldn't be feeling this way.

I as though about my reaction I realized that she was (almost typed is)one of the few people, in my experience, who speak the truth to power was gone. A reporter who said it like she saw it. Her comment had the ring of truth.

Part of my sadness is knowing that she will be replaced by the Nancy Graces' and Anderson Cooper's. Who will not risk the truth unless it helps their careers.

Who will speak the truth and is in a position to know the difference between truth and hype?

A Lost Aha

Yesterday I had one of those "aha" moments. You know that moment when two pieces of information from dispersant areas come together and an insight clicks into place.

Well, I had one of those yesterday. The problem is I can't remember what it was. You see, the moment this "aha" clicked into place my train (some would say my slow boat) of thought was interrupted. This is not an uncommon occurrence. There are many time when for instance I finish an email and want to attach a document, I get interrupted and when I get back to the email I forget to attach the document or I forget why I am going upstair after Son has drawn my attention.

This time what I have forgotten something that was relative important, or at least to my understanding of the world and how I will respond to what life brings diffrently. At least I think it was a big "aha."

My hope is that my brain has filed it way in the appropriate place and when the occasion arises for me to make use of the "aha" it will be appropriately accessed.

Of course since I can't remember what it was it could be a trivial as a new flavor of ice cream.

I guess to some people that might be a weighty issue, at least on the scales.

Know Your Space

On the way to work today it occurred to me, not for the first time, that one of the ways we can divide the world of humanity is between people who are aware of their surroundings and how their actions effect other people and how other peoples action effect them ---and those people who do not have a clue.

I am convinced that 80% of auto accidents are the result of people not being aware that there are really other people in the other cars that have independent thought and not in a video game. That is not the only place.

• There are the times in the grocery store where a person leaves their cart sit sideways in the aisle and or where the person ahead of you at the check out decides to balance their check book at the register.


• Then there are the times in the security line at the airport where people hear from the minute thye get in line they hear, or not, "have your ID's out and available" and when they get to head of the line they have repacked their ID in the bottom of the carry-on.


• There is the theater patron who takes cell phone calls and want to talk about fishing during the movie.

It is not that they only inconvenience others, there are safety issues. If you are not aware of where you are at all time you could, in the extreme, get killed. Expecting people to stop while jaywalking is not a good assumption. The person in the car could be balancing their checkbook (I am probably giving people more credit with the checkbook thing.)

One of the skills my father had and and mother has that was passed on to me and my sisters is the ability to be aware of the immediate world around us. From our father it was the ability to quickly appraise the a situtation and determine what is the appropriate response. When you survive 90 days in constant combat in World War II, you have to have that ability or you die in the first day. From our mother we got the ability to discover what is new and to have the curiosity to investigate.

One of the things I would like to pass on to Son is this ability to live fully aware of his environment. It has gotten me through a lot of life that would have been more difficult if I had been oblivious.

The only burden is that he will spend an a lot of time frustrated with most of the the other people in the world or at least the United States.

Riding The Writing Fear

If you have read my profile on the side of the blog, you know that writing is not one of my better skills. It is not that I do not have good thoughts or even know the rules. My problem is that whatever I write, my brain fixes the mistakes when I read it over. It adds (I had - or leaves off) an occasional "S'" or "K", it will complete sentences that are fragments and in general fill in what my mind wanted on paper (or screen) but was not conveyed to my fingers with the assistance of my eyes.

Today I submitted a blog to a blog journal and I think I submitted the email to the journal with "journal" misspelled as I read the entry, to an English professor no less. I have feared English teachers and professors since I can remember. I still get cold chills when I remember 3rd grade spelling test and sentence diagrams on the blackboard.

Being unable to read until I was twelve did not help my ability to recognize nouns and verbs, let along dangling participles (whose importance, I understand, is now under debate in language circles.) Even after I learned to read and in turn read my own writing, I still dreaded English. I is amazing how much I could cover up with a well-tuned memory. In high school I was in all the honor classes except English. I just could not face the humiliations of the papers returned with more red ink than I had written in black ink. My high school senior history teacher wrote at the end of one of these bleeds that "your memory is just short of photographic, but you will need to have a secretary when you get a job."

In college I had to take 7 composition courses before I could pass the required two, and I think I passed the last one because the professor took mercy on me and because my writing hand was in a splint from a work-related accident. Even though I finished my undergrad, received a MDiv, have 18 hours of doctoral work and spend 60 percent of my work life writing, nothing bring me more anxiety than to have an English teacher scrutinize my writing.

I have crawled into burning cars as a paramedic. I have searched in gang territory for a child of a church I served after he had been threatened death by a gang. I have been hijacked in Bombay, India by three men, who took me from the domestic airport to the international airport, until I gave them all the cash I had including 5,000,000 Turkish Lira (about $4.) These experiences are nothing to compare with having an English language professional (I had - a professional of the English language) point out what I have done wrong.

It is not that I do not want to know what I have done incorrectly. I do. It's that I feel like that scared, ignorant 3rd grader every time I have my writing reviewed by a expert. At the same time, there is something in me that keeps me writing and seeking help.

"Hey FD, will you edit this?"

Sure, Husband, I fixed it all and highlighted some changes I made. I'll continue to do so whenever asked. I don't want you to worry too much about this, though, for it is one of your few weaknesses, and your strengths more than compensate. Love, FD.

Thanks FD, I can use all the help I can get. I did comment on some of the changes we discussed.

Unbalanced

Wife and I joined a gym last Saturday. This is the first time in 15 years that I have (or even planed to) gone to a gym. I am not sure if Wife has ever worked out with weights. When we signed up Wife purchased a 5 session package with a professional trainer. I, being a man, with vast experience with gyms (ya right) decided I would try it on my own after I got my initial orientation.

Wife went for the first time to work out with her sister on Sunday and had a good experience. Her first appointment with the trainer is this coming Saturday. I went for the first time on Monday and when I got there I ask if someone would show me around and make sure I knew how to use the machines correctly.

Well, they grabbed a young man who started me off but he appeared to be distracted. He showed me two leg machines and got called away and never came back. After about 15 minutes of wandering around I decided that I would make an appointment and come back.

I made the appointment and went back yesterday. The trainer did all the measurements to determine my percent of body fat and told me what I already new I had an unacceptable level of body fat. He had asked me to guess what the percentage was and I said between30 to 35 percent, saying to myself that was probably low. It came back as 32 percent.

He took me out on the floor and started to evaluate my level of fitness and after two exercises he told me I was unbalance. Part of me flashed back to the one time I went to a chiropractor and was told I had one leg shorter than the other and my back was crocked and then later was told, by a number of people, that everyone has one leg longer than the other and that everyone has a crocked back. My cynical self thought I was being sold a bill of goods. But my mind excepted this fact when I could not stand on one leg, with correct posture, and not fall over when trying to exercising with the other leg.

As we continued on I could feel what he was talking about. After we were through I went back and purchased the 5 session package. Even though he tried to sell me the 28 session package.

If he tells me after I finish the 5 sessions I need more, I will think about it, but if he tells me I have one leg shorter than the other I will have to rethink this gym thing.

For Blog Below

I tried to post picture on the blog below but it would not let me. I also could not spell check!
To top it off There is not way to get a direct question to blogger. I trid to log into a help group but that did not like my "nick name."

I had to open another post to get the picture to work on this blog. I can open pictures from a blank post but not one that is in use.

Under Estimating Children

One of the things I have to keep reminding myself about children is that they are often smarter than adults. Whether it is getting us to do something or give them something they want or just going ahead and doing it themselves, children are often two steps ahead.

This might be because they have little else on their minds except to learn and explore. One of the reasons I think time appears to go by faster as we get older is because we have the “been there done that” attitude for most of the world around us. As a child we spent time looking at the grass and bugs or watching the clouds go by. As adult we might look at the clouds and spends as much time as a child but our minds grasp clouds and make determination if it is going to rain or not, without seeing the “bird” or “tree” that children observe. Time for children is slower because they are anticipating what might be, instead of making assumptions as to what is.

I know, I know - a person's own child always is the smartest, cutest and most amazing child that ever lived. They have to be that in our minds so we can handle the brain dead things they do as teenagers or adults.

That said I have to share with you some of the things Son has done to bring me back to appreciation of what might be, instead of assuming what is. Son is 2 years 5 months old:

While sitting at the dinner table staring at a pile of Banana slices, anticipating not eating them, he line them up in a row counting each one with a tone saying “ I am not eating that one 1, I am not eating that one 2 ....“

After coming down the stairs in the morning he ran to the refrigerator and with open arms as if giving a blessing, saying “ red, red, Red.” The red light, that signaled locked or unlocked, on the in the door ice and water was off. He keeps saying this until the lock is put back on and the red light appears.

Last night at dinner I asked him what he wanted for dinner after he had eaten all the things I had given him. He said “Mickey mouse” (he is not much of a meat eater but if he wanted a mouse --)so we went though pretty much every box in the pantry asking if this is what he wanted. With the response of “Noooooooo,” that relayed the tone of "you stupid man." That is until I got to the box of crackers that has a picture of Goofy on the back and he says “Yes please.”

I wish I could be that observant, enjoy time as it passes slowly instead of assuming many things and then wonder where the time went. Like the time I spent writing this blog.

Why I Serve a Congregation

There has been a number of times in my life recently I have wonder why I continue to serve a church, besides all that call from God business. All the frustrations of being in a place and serving many people who do not have much control in the other parts of their lives, in their work place, with their health or multitude of other places, who feel free to express at church all the pent up needs and to vent in a safe place. Where it is safe to be angry or _____ (fill in the emotional blank) at the pastor or unfortunately at the pastor's spouse. This is also demonstrated in the need to keep everything the same. To keep the same activities, the same traditions in order to make sure the church is the one place they can count on for stability in their lives.

My sadness is that they hold so tight to the traditions and by holding on to those traditions their safe place is only safe for them and is not open to anyone else, unless they are willing to change and become like them. Without change and/or allowing other people to make the church a safe place, on their own terms, the church becomes a tomb that is only fully realized when it is empty.

This last week I was reminded why I continue to serve a congregation, beside all that call from God business. Last week I got to spend a day with an Elder who understands what it means to be part of a congregation. We spent the day putting speakers in the sanctuary for the members of the congregation who do not hear as well as they have in the past. As we worked we both new that the room was to small to need speakers, as a matter of fact when we tested the speakers he could not always tell if the the sound was coming from me or the speakers.

What I remembered was that one of the things that keeps me serving a congregation is the privilege of being with and learning from the people am a called to serve. It might be selfish of me but I get a lot of joy of seeing people using - unselfishly - the gifts God has given to them. I believe that part of my responsibility, as a pastor, (and in general as a Christian) is to observe and then tell people when I see God at work in their living and giving. There are many people who do this all the time. I just don't always see it through the few squeaky wheels.

I am beginning the New Year reassured that God is a work in the church I have been call to serve - in spit of all we try to do to get in the way of God's purpose.