Thinking some of their thoughts

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"Abraham Lincoln", Annie Dillard, Clifton Fadimin, David Hansen, Dorothy Day, Erasmus, George Santayana, Graham Greene, Milton Agnew, Odgen Nash, Paul Egertson, Philip Wogaman, William Shakespeare

You may agree.  You may not.  But, don’t decide until you have pondered their ideas.

• We would rather err on the side of helping hurting people than on the side of hurting helpless people.  (Paul Egertson in One Family’s Story)
• Wealth, power, and prestige, when sought for their own sake and as the main purpose in life, are finally empty.  At best, they are consolation prizes for those who have lost the main thing.  (Philip Wogaman in Speaking the Truth in Love)
• What a tangled web do parents weave when they think their children are naïve. (Odgen Nash)
• What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high.

• What is past, is prologue. (Shakespeare)
• What must die in us is the subconscious desire to please people.  What must not die is the will to love.   There’s the risk. (David Hansen)
• When I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left I buy food and clothes.  (Erasmus)
• When passion usurps the name of truth, the very idea of truth is tarnished and defiled. (George Santayana)
• When you have nothing left but God, then for the first time you become aware that God is enough.

• When you re-read a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. (Clifton Fadiman)
• Whenever we are in the wrong place, our right place is empty.
• Without a cause men hated Christ; without a cause He loves them. (Milton Agnew in More than Conquerors)
• Worldly justice and unworldly justice are different.  The latter says  to turn the other cheek, to give up what one has willingly and with no spirit of martyrdom, to rejoice in being the least,  unrecognized, and the slightest. (Dorothy Day in The Long Loneliness)
• Worry, the interest paid on trouble before it is due, is one of the most foolish and irreligious habits into which we can fall.

• Worrying is like a rocking chair.  It gives you something to do but it doesn’t get you anywhere. (Abraham Lincoln)
• Write as if you were dying.  At the same time, assume your audience to be terminal patients.  That is, after all, the case.  (Annie Dilliard, in The Writing Life)
• We can measure how smart we are by our ability to understand and appreciate the intelligence of someone else.
• We can never really know where we stand with someone until our capacity to benefit that person is gone. (John Ashcroft)
• You can’t control what you love.  You watch it driving recklessly toward the broken bridge, the torn up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.  (Graham Greene)

• You cannot change the past, but you can ruin a perfectly good present by worrying about the future.
• We cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. (Abraham Lincoln)
• Although very deficient in talent, yet you may be used to draw someone else to Christ one who, in turn, may become eminent in grace and service.  We little know the possibilities within us.
• Zeal without knowledge can be dangerous, futile, or maddening.

Comments???    Let others know what you think.

Midnight train to Georgia, and Christmas

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a portrait of Godly love, I would rather live in her world than live without her in mine, Is Jesus' love any less than that of the train passenger?, Love buys the ticket to Georgia, Love trumps distance and circumstances, Love trumps separation, midnight train to Georgia, Neil Diamond, the lights of LA and the red clay of GA

Ballads.  One of the art forms with which I was raised.  Little did I realize “way back then” that there was more to those ballads than met my ears.  But, I was young, and I was naïve, and I knew very little of the human drama that would eventually work its way into my life.

One of the results of this maturing process is that now I listen to ballads with an emotional attention that was entirely foreign to me “way back then.”  Such is the case with “Midnight train to Georgia.”  It tells me what I would never have understood in my earlier life.  Here is the link to Neil Diamond’s version (www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMcU7g2vpwA), one that grabs my imagination, my emotions, and my appreciation for beauty.

L.A. proved too much for the girl
So she’s leavin’ the place she’s come to be
She’s goin’ back to find what’s left in her world
The world she left behind not so long ago

She’s leavin’ on that midnight train to Georgia
She’s goin’ back, she’s goin’ back
To a simpler place in time
And I’ll be with her on that midnight train to Georgia
I’d rather live in her world than live without her in mine

She kept dreamin’ that someday she’d be a star
But she found out the hard way some dreams don’t come true
So she pawned all her hopes, even sold her car
She bought a one way ticket back to the life that she once knew

She’s leavin’ on that midnight train to Georgia
She’s goin’ back, she’s goin’ back to a simpler place in time
And I’ll be with her on that midnight train to Georgia
I’d rather live in her world than live without her in mine

Yes and I’ll be with her on that midnight train to Georgia
I’d rather live in her world than live without her in mine
Yes I would, yes I would.

For the past weeks this piece has been on my mind.  The Christmas season has made me even more sensitive to it.  The unnamed fellow loves the girl so much that he will surrender his familiar and comfortable place and status to be with the woman he loves, even if her place is unknown and flung thousands of miles away.  Love trumps place and distance.  Love trumps circumstances.   Love trumps separation.  Love buys the ticket to be on the midnight train to Georgia.

And then there is Christmas.  Is Jesus’ love, which comes to our mind so naturally during this Advent season, any less than that of the fellow on the train to Georgia??  Are we fearful of importing the inappropriate into our understanding of the incarnation of the Son of God?  Is His love less than that of the fellow on the midnight train?  Is the Son of God not willing to taste and drink to the last dregs the life and death of humanity?  Is He not willing to leave the lights of LA for the red clay of GA?  Isn’t Jesus described in this way — “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (John 13.1).  The Son of God, who left the “heavenly palaces” to be with those He loves and who live on this place and in this space, knows what it is to ride the midnight train to Bethlehem.  He knows what it means to say, “I’d rather live in her world than live without her in mine.”  What a portrait of what Godly love does!

Of course, God’s plan is that His children eventually will live in His world with Him.  But, in the meantime, He’d rather live in our world with us than live without us in His.  What a God!  What a love!  Who in his right mind would pass up the chance to be sitting next to the Jesus who takes that midnight train to Georgia???

 

 

Compensation!!! — Add these to your list

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a spare wheel? a steering wheel?, friendships and books, God's faith, it probably won't last long either, losing vision, prayer, worry

This is a very short item today.  It compensates for the length of the last entry!!!

• Prayer?  A spare wheel?  Perhaps for some folk.  Others think a more complete analogy is a steering wheel. It makes sense to me.
• Friendships?  They are something like a book that can be destroyed quite quickly, but that normally take a long time to write.
• Life is full of temporary things.  So, if things are going well, enjoy.  If things are going wrong, it probably won’t last long either.
• I have heard it said that when God solves our problems, we have reason to justify our faith in His abilities.  Let’s consider, then, that maybe when God doesn’t solve our problem, perhaps it is because He has faith in our abilities.
• The blind fellow said, “Losing my eye sight has been bad.  But, loving my vision – that would be much worse.”
• Worry?  Does it remove tomorrow’s trouble?  No, but it does take away today’s peace.

Christmas and the unintended consequence of fear

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"unintended consequences", Asheville NC, baby Jesus, Bethlehem, Christmas, fear, gifts, Herod the Great, ownership, ownership puts us at risk, stolen - broken - lost, tennis racquet, the Magi, the massacre of the infants, there is no danger of losing what you don't have

My first tennis racquet!  I still remember that Monday Christmas morning on Coleman Ave, two blocks west of Merrimon Avenue in Asheville, NC.  The courts were not far away.  I could hardly wait to get that cat gut strung racquet out of the press (after all, that was before the era of aluminum racquets) that protected the racquet from warping.  It was too cold that day to try out the racquet and balls, but it wouldn’t be all that long before that 11 year old boy would find out that hitting a tennis ball was much more work that I had ever imagined.

But, one thing was not more than I imagined – the racquet was mine.  I was the owner now that the Christmas gifts were exchanged!!!  And, of course, I was responsible; my younger brother (by 17 months) would not get his hands on MY racquet.  I owned that racquet for many years.  I never really got very good at tennis, but I liked to play and still do, but now with my grandkids.  By now I have one of those large aluminum racquets with synthetic strings.

Christmas is just about here for 2012.  Gifts will be given, and both kids and adults will “take ownership” of both new toys and much needed non-toys.  By the time Christmas day is over, the feeling of “that is mine” will be very ingrained.  And, woe to the sibling who without permission grabs the toy belonging to someone else.

Why bring up this topic of ownership at Christmas time?  Simply because this new batch of owned items sets up a scenario of new fears that didn’t exist on December 24!  Although the fears are unintended consequences of the gift giving, they are real.  Permit me to explain, doing so within the context of the original Christmas, the incarnation of the Son of God – when Jesus was in His infancy.

The story includes the arrival of Magi from Asia, bring gifts for the new king of the Jews. Once in Palestine, the Magi ended up at the palace of the ruling king, eventually labeled Herod the Great.  The Magi’s explanation for traveling to Palestine, that they want to give gifts to the new king of the Jews, troubles Herod very deeply; he understood the clear message – a king not of Herod’s choosing would at some point replace Herod.  When the Magi were able to leave Bethlehem to begin their return to their native country, all without Herod realizing it, the news eventually got back to Herod.  He in turn, in a rage, retreated to his modus operandi for dealing with what he considers political threats, and ordered a massacre, carried out by his military, of all the infant boys of two years and less of age in the Bethlehem area.  He figured that the ‘new king” would be one of the murdered infants.  That others would die in the process was just another day at the office for Herod.

Herod’s behavior was birthed by his fear of losing something that he considered to belong only to him – his kingship.  Without the potential loss of his throne, Herod would not have been fearful of the news of a new king being born.  Herod’s plight is just as real today as it was 2000 years ago.  It can be expressed in several different ways (the reader can opt for the manner that seems best).   “You can only lose what you own.:  “There is no danger of losing what you don’t have.”  “No one can take from you what you don’t have.”  “Ownership puts us at risk of losing what we have.”  “If you give something away, it is no longer yours to lose.”  “Ownership is a threat to tranquility.”

One day I was talking with a former college classmate who had gone to Vietnam to do missionary work.  It was during the time of armed conflict in Vietnam.  In an unconscious expression of my own apprehension (could I have done what he did??), I asked my friend if he was ever afraid of losing his life in Vietnam, was he afraid of dying, of being killed?  He couldn’t have responded more succinctly, “I died before going to Vietnam.”  My friend had learned, long before I had, that you don’t fear losing what you don’t have.”

Christmas will bring in a multitude of new owned items.  Each one has the potential of being lost, broken, or stolen.  Depending on how badly we want to maintain ownership of those gifts, we will have a certain level of fear as a consequence of that ownership.  A word of advice –as early as possible, emotionally / spiritually release your sense of ownership.  If God owns you, let him also own all your things, and live free.