The Virtue in Not Being a Dumping Ground

It all started with cookies in the break room. Now, keep in mind, there are always cookies in the break room. Well, usually anyway. And okay, it’s not always cookies but brownies, doughnuts, pastries of some kind, whatever, will be found in one of our office kitchens. This is not unusual – every company worldwide has little office elves that fill it with excessive carbohydrates and other terrible things.

But here’s the thing: these particular cookies weren’t very good. This doesn’t mean anything, cookies are cookies and sometimes they get dried out or sometimes the vanilla proportions weren’t up to par or maybe they were overbaked rendering them dry and crumbly. It’s not really important. The important thing to note is that the free cookies in the break room were not that good…yet they were eaten anyway. All of them were gone by around noon.

It interested me. As an avid calorie counter and a dessert connoisseur, I’m interested when cookies are good and when they’re bad. If they’re bad, I won’t eat them. It’s too hard to expend the cost of the calories that one of those not too great cookies represent. But it seems that not everyone else feels this way because all of those so-so cookies were eaten without lack of thought or interest. They were just…consumed. And it made me think. Forgive me for turning cookies into a philosophical statement, but I wonder how many other things we mindlessly consume just because they’re there?

It appears to me that American culture has a lot of garbage in it. It’s all created for the masses, for people who don’t care about much of anything at all. From reality TV shows that showcase anything from Amish people to suburban housewives living one dramatic fantasy lie, to movies that essentially are one big noise, to songs that make no sense whatsoever and involve mostly more loud noises, there seems to be not too many things of value out there today. And it’s the valueless things that seem to take up more and more of the minds and hearts of the greater population. Forgive me for possibly sounding old and cranky (I am not old, I AM cranky) but what exactly are we putting on our plates here? Even our food is mediocre, created to be shoveled in in mass quantities without much taste. We buy without thinking, we eat without thinking, we dress according to current trend not according to principle, and we consume whatever comes along even if it’s corrupt and not fit for consumption.

These trends concern and alarm me. The culture is rotten. It stinks. So why then, do we consume it without thinking? Why are we so eager to spend ourselves and our dollars on mass media and mass-consumerism that adds essentially zero to our lives and in fact, is detrimental to our souls and to ourselves?

As Christians, we have a duty to ourselves and to Christ to treat our temples with respect. This speaks for both the inward and the outward part of us – the mind and body are two separate segments of one temple. Yet so often we just fill both our hearts and our bodies with garbage, without even thinking about it. Sometimes we don’t mean to and other times we just don’t care. This is what bothers me. As Christians, we should care. We should never expect for the culture to just float us along – it can’t. It will fail.

Today’s culture is not worth consuming. It really isn’t. It’s the equivalent of the dollar menu from McDonald’s; cheap and something you just eat to keep from dying. And so I have to ask today, what are you putting on your plate? 

Everyone Else has a Problem

Although I know I fall far from being perfect, there are a few times that I have been stumped when it came to the repentance part of my prayer time, puzzling over another hidden sin I might have done that I couldn’t think of. I think this happens to all of us. We are all far from perfect but generally speaking, we can’t always remember what it was we did to stop being that way.

And so, shielded from the memories of our past mistakes, we begin to look at others. It’s so much easier to find the flaw in a brother or a sister rather than look at the beam in our own eyes, isn’t it? It’s much more satisfying (at first) and unwinding over a good session where you pointed out flaws and failures and inconsistencies of those in your local community or church can make you feel righteous and smug. “After all,” you whisper to yourself, “I am definitely not perfect either but at least I’m not doing that.” And so it ends, our dissertation on others and their own failings.

I confess that I have done this myself. After all, I have a job, I don’t regularly do things that temper my holiness (or I try not to), I go to church faithfully and support the church faithfully…I am what you would call a good Christian. And good Christians have an unacknowledged right to point out the hypocritical tendencies in others…it’s how they can be saved, dontcha know.

And this is where we fail. This is where I fail. Because no matter how good I’ve done things, no matter how much I’ve given, none of it has taken me to heaven yet and the last time I checked the only man who was perfect was Jesus.

There’s one of the deadly sins at work here when we begin to look and completely focus on the issues of others. It’s called the sin of pride and for many of us, we relegate pride to “those people” who have huge mansions and cars and spend all their time and money on perfecting the outside. This thrust is well-deserved; pride does usually fall in the laps of “those people”. But that’s mostly because they’re participating in outward pride and in outward adornments. But how many times have each of us had pride hidden within our hearts that maybe didn’t come out in the form of an expensive purse or an expensive car? How many times have we picked something apart in our own congregation, harping endlessly on something we don’t see as right yet while looking around, there are no fruits from our endeavors anywhere? The answer is that far too many times we have rendered ourselves the judges and our fellow saints the condemned.

The only thing to counteract pride is humility and humility does not come so easily. However, it will come when you pray for it and usually in the place you don’t expect. So many times we think of humility in a completely bowed down fashion, living in a poverty-stricken stage. But sometimes humility comes when you don’t have all the answers to the questions even though you consider yourself to be intelligent. Or maybe humility comes when no open doors are provided to leave the place you want to leave and instead you have to stay where God has placed you, day after day and year after year.

God has unique ways of speaking and humbling us. But rest assured, when you pray away pride and self-righteousness, these ways will come and de-priding will probably be a painful process.

No one ever said being used was fun or being molded was a delightful task.

But, the benefits of moving completely past yourself and onto a world that needs you, you and the fruits of the Spirit you possess (you can have them, when you have no pride!) far outweigh the painful process of being humbled and molded and shaped into what you are supposed to be. And then, my friend, can God begin to really use you even in ways your formerly prideful self may not have imagined.

The Question of Right or Wrong (or if such a thing even exists)

I was listening to a Ted Talk the other day that I found extremely interesting. It was titled, “Why you think you’re right – even when you’re wrong”. The speaker, Julie Galef, was making the point that we believe certain things dogmatically because of our worldview and that occasionally this worldview should be questioned. After all, how do you know if your worldview is right or not?

Topics like this make me nervous in general. Not because I’m scared to question my beliefs, but because I’m concerned for the worldview of the speaker. Questions that invite you to examine your worldview and its accuracy can lead you down a long and complicated path filled with non-committal answers and a haze between right and wrong. Haziness between right and wrong is never good because how then do we base our morals? How do we plant our feet firmly on a ground that’s consistently changing by the picking apart of ourselves?

This is the age that we live in. It’s an age that invites you to question everything you believe and to dissect it all accordingly. To not do this is to render yourself backwards and close-minded. But I think that’s wrong. And lest you also put me in the “backwards and close-minded and 500 years ago” camp, let me explain myself.

There was a certain time in which people believed things without thinking much about them. We didn’t have to. Certain bedrock institutions of society didn’t make it necessary for us to question what we believed. Most people believed in God and went to church on Sunday. If you didn’t go to church on Sunday, it’s very likely that you were the oddball of your town. Homosexual marriage was not even a question because homosexuality was condemned, no questions asked. If you had a child out of wedlock, which didn’t happen that often because The Pill had not yet been invented and most people were too afraid to have sex before they were married (afraid of God or their mother or an unplanned pregnancy – you pick) you went somewhere else and hid out until the baby was born. Abortions weren’t as common because medical technology had not advanced that far. No one worried about pornography being a huge issue because to get a copy of something pornographic took a great deal of time and effort and most men weren’t willing to go through that trouble. Embryonic cell research wasn’t really a matter of ethics because that technology hadn’t been invented. Welfare wasn’t as big of an issue because not that many people were on it; churches and family members took care of you if you were down on your luck. The list goes on and on. And so many people didn’t have a hard time with the debates on certain moral issues because those options didn’t exist.

But, alas, they exist now and so we must use our brains and our hearts to determine what’s right and what’s wrong. And that comes to my issue. As Christians, we know certain things are wrong not just because of what we’ve been taught but because of what we read in the Bible. We know it’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage. We know gay marriage is wrong. And we know abortion is wrong because God references life in the womb as being a precious thing. And so there we have our moral stance. But what happens when we start to question it? What happens when we try to gray out the black and white areas of our lives?

It is the tendency of my generation and, in theory, the one preceding it, to reject anything that is traditional in favor of anything modern. We like to follow the “anything goes” trend. We mock and deride those with “old-fashioned” traditional values and look instead towards those who don’t seem to have any values at all. And this is where my generation sits. Not wanting to seem overly harsh and judgmental, we eschew traditional thinking because it’s seen as precisely that: harsh and judgmental. And now we have so shunned standards and ethics and morality of any kind that we are to the point where we don’t really believe in anything.

You see, the interesting thing about morals and standards is that they don’t change precisely because that’s what they are. They are a set of heart rules, for lack of a better term, and those stay the same. They don’t change with time and they stand up to scrutiny and suspicion. When you take away from those heart rules and repeatedly tear them down and take them apart, they don’t change, but you do. In fact you are the only thing that changes – what’s written in stone stays in stone.

If you find that your heart rules have changed drastically over time and if one day you decide something is right and the next day it’s suddenly wrong without whim or reason, then perhaps it’s time to check your heart. There is, after all, a great sense of relief in knowing that Jesus Christ never changes - He most certainly is unshakeable - and that if we believe in Him, we won’t either. 

Friday! But first, let's rehash Thursday

Yesterday I tried to make potato fries. I know it’s usual to assume all fries are made of potato but as it happens, everyone seems to be making everything into fry format lately so potato emphasis seemed necessary.

Anyway, the fry making process was exhausting and reminded me of why places like Wendy’s and McDonalds exist. I know, I know, quell horror at eating fast food! BUT really, has anyone ever made french fries as good as McDonalds’ at their house? The answer is no and with good reason because the process requires an inordinate amount of steps and thus should only be handled by professionals.

I decided to attempt this on my own, however, because I’m foolish and desirous of making my life difficult. So I went to town on some innocent potatoes, hacked them into fry-sized pieces with a large knife, did not slice any part of my anatomy in the process and proceeded to almost set my apartment complex on fire. Let me explain.

The recipe called for oil to be heated on a cooking sheet in the oven before the fry wedges were placed on it. I did this. However, I did not contemplate the oil dripping off onto the heated coils of the stove which happened promptly causing flames to randomly shoot up and scare me to death. I had visions of everything exploding and my entire unit dying in a fiery furnace (what a horrible way to go) or worse, surviving the flames and being a burn victim for the rest of my life unable to eat properly or go out in the sun. It was a scary five minutes.

However, I managed to turn off the stove, clean up the oil, partially anyway, and resumed making the fries shortly thereafter. I credit the Lord for giving me the courage to complete these tasks and also my own errant stupidity which did not even think about trivial things like “safety” or “apron” or “Whataburger is across the street and has french fries.”

In the end the fries were good, rather edible, and quite tasty when sprinkled with loads of salt (as is the case with most foods…I am a salt fiend). But never again. Never again will I try to do something that only costs around $2 when purchased from a restaurant. I do not care about cholesterol or sodium or any of the other food-trigger warnings. It’s much better to die of a heart attack than being burned alive.

So that consisted of my Thursday. Today is Friday and I can already hear the lazy calls of the weekend. Is it 5 yet?

Life in the 21st Century or...It's all about you, boo boo!

The 2016 presidential election is about 1 month away. The candidates are both horrifying, no one likes them, and everyone keeps asking the question, “how did we get here?”

It’s a valid thing to ask. When not a single person you know likes either candidate and is just as utterly surprised and dismayed as you are at the prospect of voting for them, it’s hard to see how something like this came to be. But, like all other atrocities in life, the answer is really very simple.

If you look at either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, you can notice one thing: they are in a mad grasp for power, and they don’t actually care about Americans. Both smack of vulgarity and of false pretensions. They didn’t want to become president to make your life better, they only wanted to become president to make their lives better. It’s not about you, it’s about them. For Hillary Clinton, it’s about snatching the one position she’s always longed for and trampling over everyone else to get there. Hillary doesn’t want the position because she’s a woman and because she wants to make a stand for women’s rights. She doesn’t want the position because she loves working in politics so much. No, Hillary wants to become president because she wants to become president for herself. She only cares about Hillary. She might also want the power to lock away Bill for life, I’m not sure. Maybe to payback Monica for good (I jest).

Donald Trump is a joke and I’m not sure how a billionaire from New York (of all places) came to be the mouthpiece of the ordinary American. He’s never done anything ordinary in his life. He’s a laughingstock and each time he opens his mouth I’m suddenly seized by a desire to run from the room. To be quite frank, I’m not sure why he wants to be president. A lot of people are saying it’s because he wanted to help Hillary win since they have been such good buddies for most of their lives (a fake friendship based off political tradeoffs and favors, but that’s neither here nor there). This is an entirely plausible explanation. I don’t believe it’s because the good billionaire suddenly wanted to become the mouthpiece for the ordinary man, I believe that like Hillary, he wanted to run for his own selfish ambitions. He wants to become president because of the strings he can pull once he’s the leader of the free world (God help us) and because it’s such an impressive thing to add to your resume, dontcha know.

And so you have an unsettled election to put it mildly. It’s very serious in that the world is in a tumultuous, serious place, but it seems to be unserious based on the attitudes and behaviors of the candidates. Any debate that mostly consists of jabs and smirks and rolled eyes is not presidential in the slightest and makes a mockery of the participants. And so we come back to the original question: how did we get here?

The answer lies in ourselves. We, the populace of the United States of America, are the reason that we have two awful candidates. The fault lies directly at our feet.

There is a passage of scripture in the book of 2 Timothy that speaks on this and all churchgoers know it well: “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

This passage speaks, shouts actually, and I think for many of us, the shouts fell on deaf ears. No one really thought that these things would happen. No one really considered the implications of loving pleasure more than loving God, of loving ourselves more than anything else. It just didn’t occur to us.

Candidates like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the rolled up end result of years and years and decades of selfish behaviors, thoughts, and actions.

As Americans, we encourage selfishness. We applaud it. We applaud the millionaire who stomped over everyone to rise to the top. We applaud the celebrity who exists off Instagram followers and the millions who watch her every move that she posts online. We criticize people who get married and have children too young, thus curtailing a life of selfishness they could have had. And then we wonder why our children are a wreck, why girls as young as seven now report having self-image issues about not being skinny enough and why young boys are out of control at school and at home. We wonder why our teenagers are rude and ridiculous. We wonder why our 20 year olds are purposeless and vacant. We wonder why our elderly are in nursing homes by the thousands and why our marriages fall apart more often than they stay together…it’s because we stopped caring. It’s because we embraced a lifestyle of living only for yourself and this is what happens when all you live for is yourself. People get hurt. Lives get derailed and ruined.

The solution to this problem lies in two parts. One, God comes first. Two, you do not.

God first. Not me. Now embrace the mantra and move forward.