Thank God for small favors

There is a family at my church who's been going through a crisis. I'll probably get the details wrong because I don't know them personally, and I've only heard the story second-hand, but it doesn't matter so much. See, this family has a child, a boy slightly younger than two years old, who right around Christmas time started acting rather strange. Kids that age don't tend to do much anyway, but all of a sudden, he seemed to be especially quiet and inactive, and after he'd been like that for some time, they decided to take him to the hospital, just to be on the safe side.

Well, it turned out that there indeed was something wrong. A scan was taken and indicated that he was bleeding into his brain. Surgery was performed, and it was revealed that the boy had a large tumor which was removed. At the time I am writing this, the boy seems to have recovered; he's back home again and acting normally. He's going to undergo a series of chemotherapy treatments in the coming months, which of course won't be fun, but at least his prospects are good, and his life was saved.

People have sick children all the time. People get cancer. People get treatment. And people recover. Why bring up the story? Because of miracles, and how we perceive them.

Once again, I'm only hearing this story second-hand, but the mother is apparently brimming over with joy and thanksgiving that her son is going to be alright. Through an extensive prayer network, people all over the world have been praying for this boy, and have sent the mother e-mails expressing their thankfulness to God that the boy has recovered. Her response to this crisis is to declare that her son's diagnosis, treatment and recovery are a miracle of God.

Now, I know I wrote about this topic before, but it deserves a brief mention again, that sometimes I suspect the purpose of suffering and misfortune is to turn us to God. If our lives were smooth sailing, we probably would never look to a higher power. This mother was a Christian before all of this transpired, but something about what happened has caused a deepening of her faith. It may very well be that the boy, upon hearing this story when he is old enough to understand it, will also gain great faith from it. From a theistic perspective, suffering can serve a higher purpose (if indeed faith is important).

But I had a little epiphany when I heard the story, and it wasn't the one above, although it comes from the same source. I've spent a lot of time discussing religion, faith and theology with skeptics, and inside my head there's a little voice of a skeptic that goes with me into every conversation. That little voice, speaking out for the skeptics not physically present in the room as the story was told, said, "A kid has a brain tumor, and we're all thanking God for it, simply because he got over it? How stupid is that? If God was really looking out for the kid, wouldn't he have not had a tumor at all?"

I've heard this argument before in one form or another of course, and there does seem to be some logic to it. Wouldn't it be better to not suffer at all? You'd think so, but it's this very argument that tends to lead me to the thoughts I shared above and previously. Suffering leads to introspection, leading some theists to greater faith, some atheists to further skepticism, and various people of both persuasions to reevaluate what they believe. Yet there is another implication.

If indeed to not have a brain tumor is better than having one, what does that imply about those of us who don't have brain tumors? If recovery from a brain tumor can be considered a miracle, then doesn't that imply that not having one in the first place is better than a miracle?

I've heard it said in a sermon or two (paraphrased), "Instead of asking why some kid had a brain tumor, ask why you don't!" Suffering is a fact of life, and whether you are a theist who believes it to be the result of Original Sin or an atheist who sees it as a matter of "nature's red in tooth and claw", or whatever your belief persuasion may be, consider that any moment without suffering may be the biggest miracle of all!

Think of the implications. A couple who suffers from infertility managing to finally have a baby is not nearly as impressive of a miracle as a couple who has no trouble procreating in the first place. A man who survives a nasty automobile accident should, in some sense, not be nearly so thankful as an everyday commuter who manages to spend over an hour each day at speeds up to seventy miles per hour without her car ever coming into contact with an immobile object beyond the road passing beneath her wheels. Every plane that doesn't crash, every surgery that a patient lives through, every bank that doesn't go under when the stock market drops, every job you manage to keep, every walk through your house in the dark without a stubbed toe, and every day you wake up in the morning to find you're still drawing breath into your lungs: those are all profound miracles that we are blind to because we pass through them like a fish through water.

And then there's this: Can an atheist really say that it's better not to have a tumor in the first place? If suffering shows us the "truth" that there is no God, then wouldn't it be better for the boy to not only have a tumor, but to die? Shouldn't we all be wiped out by a plague, or even better, have a huge meteor ram into the earth and destroy all life?

It used to be that theodicies were about theists finding ways to reconcile suffering with the accepted concept of a good and loving God. In the modern age, discussions of the problem of suffering have often been the result of atheists arguing that there is no reconciliation of these concepts. But it seems there is an inherent flaw. If suffering turns us away from God, and it's true that there is no God, and truth is good, then suffering is good. But there can't possibly be enough suffering, because there is a lot of the world that is full of these little miracles.

I don't know that any of this makes any sense. Then again, is there any sense in the suffering of a little boy with a brain tumor? Yet it happens. When we try to make sense of the world, are we losing sight of the bigger picture? Are atheists' preconceived notions blocking their understanding of something profound? Are mine? Probably both.

Warning: Mature Content

I remember a time many years back, I think it was before I was a Christian (seems likely, I don't remember many of the details except the dialogue), when I was with a group of guys who were talking about sex. In particular, the topic under discussion was the morality and legality of sex with an underage partner. "Who would be stupid enough to have sex with a fifteen-year-old?" somebody asked. I quickly piped up, "I had sex with a fifteen-year-old." Every eye turned to me, wide and shocked. I smiled. "I was sixteen at the time."

Okay, confession time over. Yeah, I did some things in my teen years that I look back on as being very foolish, but that's not the point. Whether sexual or not, we all do foolish stuff when we're teenagers. It seems to be a time in life when we start to think we're as smart as adults, but few of us really are. Results may vary.

Now if you happen to be a teenager who's famous, your foolish mistakes will likely be broadcast on national television. In 2008, there were two famous teens who made what were considered to be foolish mistakes that to my mind, while foolish, say more about us as a culture than about those specific teenagers.

Miley Cyrus, sometimes known as the Disney star "Hannah Montana", was in the news this last year for posing for nude photographs. I don't really know how old she is, although I am aware she's under 18. Posing for nude photographs while under age 18 is considered a serious thing by our government, generally. I don't know how many people know this story, but back in the early days of Playboy, they had a centerfold that was 16 years old. Now, of course the idea behind limiting such ventures to those of legal age is to avoid exploitation of children, and as the story goes, this young woman came to the offices of the magazine escorted by her mother. Hugh Hefner no doubt figured that if he had parental permission, everything was fine. The feds said no, and there were consequences. Really, that made sense. If you make the assumption that anything goes so long as a minor's parents allow it, then one flings the door wide open to all sorts of exploitation. Think about it: do you think it would be alright for a child to become a prostitute just because her parents were her pimps? I hope your answer is "No!" As it happened, Cyrus' dad Billy Ray was not only present for much of the photo shoot, but was even in some of the pictures (not the nude one). Rather than making people think that made it okay, as far as I can tell, it made people rather angry at Mr. Cyrus for consenting to what they considered unconscionable.

How unconscionable was it, though? I saw the picture, and it made me think (not in a sexual manner, I didn't find the photo at all titillating). This is the thing: I think around the same time this picture was in the news, the movie Iron Man was released in the theaters. In that movie, the leading lady (Gwyneth Paltrow? I'm having a hard time with names this morning.) has a scene in which she shows off more skin than Miley; she was wearing an evening gown. Iron Man wasn't rated G, but I feel pretty confident that the rating had nothing to do with Paltrow's exposed back. In Cyrus' "nude" picture, it was only her back that was visible as well, but for her, it was scandalous.

Why is it that an adult (or even a child, actually) can appear in a movie or television program dressed in, let's say, a skimpy bikini, and it's alright, pieces of art such as Venus de Milo or Michelangelo's David can show pretty much complete nudity, but a teenage girl can't pose draped in a sheet? Note that I'm not saying I completely disagree with the critics on this matter, I only question it as a philosophical matter: what is considered by society to be unacceptable sexuality is vague at best.

Think about it: I'm pretty sure I have nude photos of my own daughters, but we're talking about photos of them under age two. I assume that nobody but the vilest of perverts would find them sexually enticing. The movie The Cider House Rules has a momentary shot of the female lead completely nude, but from the back, allowing what I thought was a movie of very mature content to garner a PG-13. I'm sure there are quite a few people who found that scene very sexually enticing--yet socially acceptable. There is a vague gray area somewhere between the ages of two and eighteen where the thought of sexuality is considered dangerous.

I find something about it ironically amusing. The other teenager who made the news last year was Jamie Lynn Spears. You probably heard about it, but she got pregnant. People were shocked, and I don't understand why. Back in the early days of her career, her older sister Britney had publicly stated that she was a virgin, and planned to remain so for some time. While of course there were those who admired this personal conviction, (however well it may have turned out for her) I seem to recall numerous people in the media who ridiculed the idea. Whether personally addressing Britney's choice in particular, or talking about issues of teen sexuality and scoffing the idea of any teenager being able to be abstinent, the idea seemed to many to be a joke. To many people, it's simply a given that teenagers have sex. News flash: the media may not be aware of it, but teen sex is the leading cause of teen pregnancy.

Our modern society expects teens to be sexually mature and active, and yet at the same time, keep any outward sign of it to themselves. Dress slutty, but don't take your clothes completely off; have sex, but make sure you somehow magically suffer no long-term effects; talk to anyone in the world about your sexuality except for your parents because--despite the fact they had you, and therefore must have had sex at least once--they're surely the least likely people in the world to have anything useful to say about the subject. I wonder what sorts of discussions Miley Cyrus has had with her dad about sex. It seemed like the buzz I picked up is that either he was irresponsible for passively allowing it to happen, or that he was immoral for actively encouraging it. Isn't it possible that they had an intelligent discussion about what's acceptable and what's not? If Miley Cyrus is old enough to have a career, one might think she's old enough to make her own decisions, and not be judged for it. Maybe, I don't know; this is a complicated issue.

I think what most people tend to worry about is the fact that we have a strong tendency to look to celebrities as some sort of role models. Average people like famous people, for some reason it's human nature. My own daughters will tell you if you ask them that they are big fans of "Hannah Montana", although to be honest, I don't think they know who she is; they certainly have never seen an episode of the Disney TV show. Do I want them emulating this behavior? No, but then again, I also recognize the validity and value of artistic expression. One of my daughters wants to be an artist, and if she pursues that interest, no doubt she'll end up doing nude figure drawing, simply because it's an integral part of an art education. She may even pose for other artists, and if she's being smart about it, then good for her I say, and age doesn't really matter.

The truth is, if we're worried about the effect that celebrities have on our children, then maybe something is wrong. Wrong with us. I don't know firsthand, but I get the impression that Cyrus is considered to be a very talented young lady, and that's something to be admired. At the same time, I would urge my own children not to set up any other person, famous or not, to be a role model for their lives carte blanche, but rather to make decisions for themselves as to what's moral behavior, and emulate their own consciences instead. Whatever Cyrus' intentions were in doing the things she did, she's not going to be a perfect model of moral uprightness. Nobody can be guaranteed to be that. I know I'm not.

Election Day:An open letter to God

Dear God,

This is election day.

I already voted via mail, and I prayed that I would make the right decisions concerning my vote. I prayed that I would vote according to Your will, and that I would have a clear conscience about it, whatever Your will might be. I also know that You love us and care about what we feel, and I want to ask You for your grace and mercy on this, democracy's Holy Day.

Lord, I don't know who You want to hold office, but I do know that whoever does, they will have been put there by Your will. I pray that I and my fellow Christians would not cease to pray for the well-being of our next President, no matter who he (or she) might be, no matter their political affiliations or personal beliefs, no matter how close this election gets. I pray that the new President would be kept in good health, would be protected form harm, and would be focussed on doing the best he can to lead our country towards a brighter future.

I know that we as a country are in the middle of two wars which have stretched longer than most people thought, and I pray that you would bring resolution to these conflicts. I pray, not that peace would reign on earth, because I know that will never come before You do, but that the wars that we do fight will be fought for justice and righteousness, not for greed or hate, and that they would be resolved with minimal bloodshed.

Lord, I pray for our economy. I do not pray for easy answers and a speedy recovery, but for the people of the world who have lived in prosperity to experience enough struggle that they see money in itself is not the answer to their problems. I pray that people would turn to You in their troubles, and find the grace they truly need for their souls, not their wallets.

I pray for my children, and for all the children of the world. I pray that their parents and grandparents will make choices that will leave them a world where they can live in freedom and peace, and that we would manage to set a better example for them than we have, both politically and spiritually. Let us all realize that while we hope and vote for a government that will solve the problems of the world, in the end, it is us as individuals who have the power to shape it and do what's right, and no government can fix the problems of a people who choose to live with selfishness in their hearts.

That is why most of all, I pray for me, Lord. Shape me into the man that You would have me be. Let me be everything my family and community needs of me. Let me look on others, whether they be family and friends or strangers, with compassion. Let me listen for Your voice guiding my path in Your ways, so that I can be an agent of love, not hate.

Lord, I thank You for the gift of prayer, that You, King of the universe, would allow us to talk to You, and hear our prayers. I offer up this prayer in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Lord of Atlantis

The thought should have comforted Bobby but it didn't. He found himself thinking of what William Golding had said, that the boys on the island were rescued by the crew of a battle-cruiser and good for them...but who would rescue the crew? ...[T]he words still haunted Bobby. What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about. -Hearts in Atlantis, Stephen King, p. 153

Hearts in Atlantis may be one of the best books I've ever read, and perhaps the reason why may make me more than a bit of a cynic. Stephen King has written an awful lot of books, and they vary greatly in subject, tone and even genre. Generally, I think of him as a very good writer, someone who has the ability to show us the serious and dark side of things, often using metaphors of the supernatural. A lot of people see his work as being schlocky, but to me, that's part of the magic of it: Yes, he's schlocky, but there's still something powerful in what he has to say that both his casual fans and dismissive detractors will miss.

I remember as a high school freshman writing my first real essay on a book in response to The Shining. What I mean by "real essay on a book" is that this was something that went beyond elementary-school "book reports" in which you essentially wrote up a page synopsis of what happened on the surface of the plot of the book you had just read. You know, this would be the sort of thing like, "The Shining is a book about a writer who spends the winter in a haunted hotel and tries to kill his family." Throw in some descriptions of the main characters and evaluations such as, "I thought this book was awfully spooky, but good," to pad it out to 250 words and you'll pass seventh-grade English. I remember thinking with great satisfaction as I produced that essay that this was something much better than just a grouping of words set on paper to keep me from flunking out, just as The Shining was far more than a haunted house story.

Maybe it was growing up with an alcoholic stepfather that made me see the story the way I did. (I suppose I should insert the disclaimer that I'm not playing the victim card here: I'm sure I had it much better than many children with alcoholic parents; my stepfather was a drunk, but not abusive.) I argued that The Shining was an allegory for the way that alcohol abuse can transform a person into something ugly that's not really who they should be, and thus destroy their family. Sure, the fictional Overlook Hotel was a place with a dark history and seemingly crowded with evil spirits, but it seemed clear to me that the "spirits" that were of the most concern were the ones that had caused the protagonist to lose control and break his three-year-old son's arm long before he ever even heard of the Overlook, and the ghost of that shame haunted his life in a far more terrifying way than any supernatural specter could ever manage.

The Shining was not a book I had been assigned to read, and I doubt it's a book that is often assigned to students as required reading, although it's pretty good. I read somewhere recently (I'm afraid I don't recall where it was) that there is usually nothing that will squash interest in a book for a reader more quickly than telling them they have to read it, and I think there's definitely truth to it. Had various middle and high school reading lists been different, I no doubt would have liked William Shakespeare considerably more and Stephen King considerably less, but there was one book that I was assigned to read in high school that instilled an excitement in me that even requirement to read could not dull. That book was Golding's Lord of the Flies, a book that King featured prominently in both Hearts in Atlantis and Cujo.

What I particularly remember about it was the discussions that took place in the class in which we were assigned Lord of the Flies. It seemed that few of my classmates found the story believable and saw the world and its people with far more of a rosy tint than I could allow myself. Surely, if children in real life were to act like the children in the book, it must be because they were somehow taught to act so. Violence and hatred don't come naturally, and most of us are much better than that, right? I didn't know why it was they thought so, but life had taught me otherwise. In first grade, waiting for the bus to school, a young man had been hit by a car, and fellow elementary school students had crowded the curbside shouting, "Cool, look at all the blood!" as we waited for an ambulance to arrive. In second grade, I'd seen classmates break into fistfights over someone cutting in line for the drinking fountain when another drinking fountain not four feet away had no line at all. In fourth grade, a playground bully realized he couldn't get at me in front of the teacher monitoring the playground at lunch, so he found out what route I used to walk home and met me there with five of his friends to help hold me down and beat me up. I remember a summer in junior high in which a tent mate at my summer camp thought that retaliating against someone who'd dumped a bucket of cold water on him by dumping a bucket of scalding-hot water on them was a neat idea. Besides all these overt physical acts of violence, there was the fact that there was hardly a single child in the world I knew that had not at some point in time engaged in some form of character assassination against a schoolmate.

Nobody has to teach children to be selfish, that's just natural and (God help us) even logical. It seems a fact of life that we have to be selfish in order to survive, at least to some degree. Yet in addition to that, nobody seems to need to teach us how to be petty, cruel and backbiting either. Every child wants to be well-liked, but for some reason I cannot fathom (although surely I've not been immune) most children seem to want to decrease the popularity, esteem and success of others. Our parents don't tell us to go to kindergarten and call some other kid a "poo-poo head"; we just do it...because. The school bully who shakes down smaller kids for their lunch money probably isn't hard up for cash; he just enjoys causing fear and humiliation and the ensuing sense of power it gives him. I have been made to understand, both from women who have had to live with it and from Hollywood, that girls engage in a subtle sort of social bullying that's far worse than anything we boys can imagine or even understand, and it seems to come as naturally and regularly as their monthly cycle.

That's what's really so engaging and chilling about Lord of the Flies: the fact that it's somehow more than a mere work of fiction. We live it. As children, we seem to be constantly a moment away from breaking down into complete anarchy and savagery. It's a cliché that has some great truth to it: that it only takes a minute for the teacher to step out of the classroom for the spitballs to come out. Sometimes, it's more than spitballs. Sometimes, it doesn't matter if the teacher has left the classroom. Years before the infamous tragedy at Columbine high school, King wrote a story called "Rage", in which a high school student walks into a classroom with a gun and shoots the teacher. What ensues in the story is not a massacre, but an afternoon in which this student, who has crossed over a line that most of us hopefully would never cross, shows how close to crossing over lines the others in the class have come themselves. Once again, King shows a side of horror that's not rooted in the supernatural at all, this time in a more straightforward fashion, allegories left by the wayside. In doing so he gives a story that's chilling not only in itself, but in the fact that recent years have shown us that so very dark tale is far lighter fare than the facts that the nightly news will bring. Many of us would rather have the fantasy, because the good guys so often win in the end.

It's something that we tend to do to lighten the weight of evil. Both in fiction and in real life, we look to the supernatural to explain away evil. In Cujo (oddly enough, one of my least-favorite King novels), the story revolves around a rabid dog that directly and indirectly causes the deaths of many people in a town that a few years before had been victimized by a serial killer. More than once, characters from the book seem to be of the opinion that somehow the spirit of this serial killer is haunting the town, maybe even possessing the rabid dog in order to carry on the killing spree even in death. It's a work of fiction, but in real life, rational people don't think of serial killers that way, do they? It would be easier, though. Rather than think that a fellow human being would be capable of certain atrocities, there's almost a comfort in imagining that a demonic force drove him to kill, and that same force lingered around so we could place upon it the blame for the tragic accident of a rabid dog left to run free and kill some more.

Just a few years after my class read Lord of the Flies, in that same small rural high school where my classmates couldn't believe in the imagined atrocities of children left to their own devices, a student decided that breaking up with his girlfriend was too much trouble, and it would be easier to kill her and dump the body in a ravine. The story briefly made national news as it was announced his lawyer would actually plead before the court that the boy was possessed by Satan. Heck, I'm a Christian and actually believe that Satan is a real being, and yet I call this bullshit. I don't know how the case turned out, nor do I want to, but I do know this: we as human beings don't like to think that one of us is capable of killing simply to get out of a date, but from what I have seen, history shows that human beings are willing to kill just because we can.

Lord of the Flies is probably not a book that often gets pigeonholed into a specific genre, being left in that wide-open field of 'fiction' (or the more pretentious 'literature'), but really, it's 'horror' through and through. We've been conditioned by our culture to think of 'horror' as a genre to be a sort of sub-genre of 'sci-fi/fantasy', in which terrible, bloody things happen at the hand of fantastic subhuman or superhuman beings, but we forget that the true horror of life is that terrible things happen constantly in the natural world by the will of perfectly natural humans. Adolph Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden aren't "monsters", but regular people like you and me who used their influence over others to encourage acts of great evil. The boys on that island may be products of fiction, but their actions are tame compared to those of their non-fictional contemporaries in many parts of the world.

Bobby Garfield, the young protagonist of the first story in Hearts in Atlantis, comes into contact with some fearsome evil beings sprung from a fictional world in Stephen King's head: the "low men in yellow coats." (They're not much like the toned-down characters in the movie with Anthony Hopkins, for those who have seen it but not read the book.) Yet these strange characters–who we rational readers realize will never cross paths with us in the real world–are not nearly so frightening as a variety of other characters that he comes across whom he thinks of as also being "low men", but not at all in a supernatural sense. At a pivotal point in his story, his girlfriend is accosted by three older boys, who beat her with a baseball bat. (Another minor recurring theme of King's work is the use of mundane sports equipment for violent acts: In the movie version of The Shining, the father attacks his family with an ax, but in the novel, it was a mallet from a game like croquet. In 'Salem's Lot, the protagonist stakes the heart of a vampire with a broken baseball bat. Coincidentally, the real-life murder in my home town involved a baseball bat as well.) The story being set in 1960, many of the boys in the story grow up and are sent to fight in Vietnam where they, as adults, will perform acts perhaps far more gruesome than beating up an eleven-year-old girl with a baseball bat, and this time, they'll do it with the support of their government.

The characters in this book struggle with the issues of senseless violence in different ways: trying to atone for it, living in denial of it, and in several cases even responding in kind. These are very human reactions, ones that are often explored in the horror genre but here laid bare by lack of extreme measures of the supernatural. There's something extremely frightening about schoolboys that beat up a girl with a baseball bat that bogeymen and space aliens can't seem to match, because things like the former happen every day. Anne Rice vampires philosophically contemplating the morality of taking the blood of innocents in order to satisfy their lust for blood may make for good entertainment, but governments contemplating the same to satisfy the lust for petroleum and power? We have to live with that in the real world! The phrase "man's inhumanity to man" has always seemed a strange one to me, as "inhumanity" seems to be one of the hallmarks of humanity.

I had been working on this piece of writing off and on for some time, at one point thinking it would be an appropriate piece for publishing on September 11th, a date most people today relate to the real-world reality of horror. (As it is, today, the 19th, is an appropriate anniversary as well, although even more mundane and less well-known.) There's a big part of me that is glad I waited, for a few reasons. I'm much less sentimental about anniversaries than most people, rarely seeing significance in a date just because it happens to be that same date that something else happened in the past; after all, calendars are largely arbitrary. As for arbitrariness, I remember for some time that conspiracy buffs were struggling to find meaning in why the attacks happened on September 11, but as far as I know, nobody ever forwarded a theory of substance. September 11th was really just a day like any other day before the first plane crashed, and the date may as well have been chosen by throwing a dart at a calendar. We look for higher meaning in tragedy, perhaps in the hope that if we can understand what "9/11" really means, we'll know when the next date will be. Of course, when (not if) that day comes, it will once again be just another day the morning before whatever tragedy it is occurs.

And as for the senseless violence we perpetrate in response to senseless violence? Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart made a sobering point about 9/11 and all the battles that have been waged over it. "Nineteen people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough to make the world safe enough that nineteen people wouldn’t want to do harm to us." Obviously, we can't. We won't stop violence by answering it with more violence, but we also won't stop it by ignoring it. The truth is, we simply won't stop it, period. All it takes for violence to occur is a single man with a gun, or even a kid with a baseball bat. And that is horror on a level that fiction can never reach.

Leap year: no exceptions!

I can't resist the odd siren call of posting on Leap Day. However, I can't think of a post topic that is apropos.

And maybe that's the topic?

When I was very young, I guess I must have been about eight, I remember being introduced for the first time I recall to the concept of leap years. I was born in a leap year, as of course were many of my friends throughout school, being roughly the same age. In college, I had a friend who was actually born on Leap Day, making today either her 36th birthday or 9th, depending how you choose to look at it. (I did call and wish her a happy birthday, and actually got to celebrate her 5th birthday with her more or less, living with her in the same house at the time.) You'd think having a birthday of the 29th of February would be really cool, but despite the assurance of Cecil Adams, my friend only really felt like she was truly having a birthday on the actual 29th, and so only got a "real" birthday every four years. Thus, you are different, but in a way that isn't so much fun.

But back to my own youth... I recall thinking that it was odd but cool that some years were different. I really had no idea that the year had a (fairly) constant length, and that most years were 365 days, but some years were 366. (My own children, who are four-and-a-half are just now beginning to grasp the concept of seven-day weeks.) Those odd years seemed quite special, and of course, that odd day in itself. I also was quite taken with the concept that while years divisible by four had an extra day, years divisible by 100 did not. And yet, the year divisible by 100 that I eventually would experience would be an exception. So although leap years were an exception to the general rule, 2000 would be an exception to the exception to the exception. Somehow, I wasn't sure whether this was as cool as a regular leap year.

So I often thought, how interesting it would be to live in 1900, when there would be a year that was not in the regular cycle of leap years! Why was this exciting? Simply because it was something different! Of course, I still had something to look forward to in that I would be living through the change to a new millennium! Surely that was cooler than the change to a mere century. But 2000 seemed so far away, and of course then we'd have to live through the horror of intelligent computers killing our astronauts to keep us from knowing about space aliens, or something like that.

Of course now, having lived through the supposed change of the millennium and the actual change on New Year's Day 2001, the concept sinks in to an older and more experienced brain that whether the year starts with a 1 or a 2, whether it's New Year's Day or Leap Day or my own birthday, it's just another day, and these divisions we give to the times we live in are completely arbitrary. The millennium passing was not very exciting at all, even with the specter of the Y2K bug hanging over us. Whether today is February 29th or March 1st, all that really matters to me on a personal level is that it's Friday, and the weekend will be here by sundown.

The thing is, there's something sad about that. Not that we can change it, but there's a beauty to a mind that can look at days, even a day as mundane as a day in 1900 that didn't exist, but fell between the crack of February and March. A few months after that leap year in my youth, I was starting third grade, a new year that happened to be in a new school, with a new teacher, and anything could happen. This month, I moved into a new office, many days I write a new blog post, my children learn new things in school, and day by day I feel what even on the most exciting days is, compared to that excitement of youth, a crushing boredom.

How would it feel to get that sense of awe back? Could you watch the sun set, and not just see it as a beautiful sunset, but with the beauty and awe that you might have had with the very first sunset you ever saw? Could I put my children to bed tonight and look at them with the same profound sense of raw, new love that I felt seeing them for the first time on the day they were born? When you're young, everything is new and exciting, but when you're older, there are so many exceptions to that sense of wonder.

Is it possible to find a way to live life and find exceptions to the exceptions?

Fireproof

A couple months ago, my boss was having me research info on fire safes. As with a number of businesses, we back up the information on our servers to a tape drive, and put the tapes in a small safe to protect them from fire and/or theft. If you're not familiar (which I'm guessing most people are not), fire safes are typically given ratings of one-hour, two-hour or three-hour, which is more or less considered the amount of time a given safe can sit in a typical building fire without the contents being damaged. My boss wasn't happy when I gave him the particulars of what these ratings mean on a more technical level, expressing that he wanted a safe that would offer complete protection and be truly fire-proof. I explained to him as it says on this website:

Remember, provided there is enough heat, NOTHING IS ACTUALLY FIREPROOF and everything WILL BURN.

As you likely have heard in the news, a large portion of Southern California is burning this week. Over thirty fires have consumed half a million acres of land (about half the size of Rhode Island), taken the lives of at least six people, injured over fifty firefighters, destroyed over 1,500 homes, and are still going at this time.

Like pretty much everything that happens around me, the fires caused some introspection and reflection. Even in areas like the one where I live that are not actually on fire, ashes fall continually, and the sky has been a brownish-orange for six days and probably will continue to be for some time even if the fires are extinguished soon. Everywhere is being effected.

But it did get a bit personal on Monday morning when I drove to work and found the street my office is on blocked off by police. I was a block away from work, and though I couldn't see the fire itself, I could tell from the smoke that it was just a block away again on the far side of my office. I was allowed through the roadblock and arrived at work where my boss informed me that we were not yet told to evacuate, but we knew there was a high likelihood of it as indeed, the fire was just a block away. He himself had gone to the roof of our building and taken pictures of the flames rising through the trees on a neighboring ridge earlier that morning.

I sat at my desk and took some time to survey the junk that usually litters it. Once the call came to evacuate, which was pretty much a sure thing, I wouldn't have time to grab more than one or two things off of my desk, so I decided to be preemptive and grab everything that was irreplaceable, put it in a bag, and take it to my car that moment. It stuck me as I was gathering up my belongings that there were some things that I brought to work with me because I thought they would be safer sitting in a drawer in my work desk than sitting in a drawer in a desk in my home. "What if something happened to my house?" I'd often thought in the past. "Better to bring this to work for safekeeping." Nothing of monetary value, just personal sentimental value. Now I had come to realize that work was not a safe place after all. About an hour later, in fact, my boss would be having me load office equipment into my car to take home for safekeeping, ironically including our fire safe.

I started to think about it all. I already knew that home was not safe. I don't have a safe, so important documents are kept in a cardboard box. Put the box on the floor, and it will be destroyed in a flood. Put the box on a high shelf and it will be destroyed in a fire. Put the box in my car and it will be destroyed in a car crash. Put it anywhere at all and it could be stolen.

Is buying a safe the answer, though? Testing safes for effectiveness is a very lengthy process, and few safes that are not priced at hundreds of dollars make it. They put them in furnaces to simulate fire conditions; then while still hot, they drop them from a certain height to simulate a collapsing building; then they submerge them in water to see if they keep watertight because no doubt the firefighters will dump hundreds of gallons of water into your office building to stop the burning. If you didn't choose a safe that was good enough for the sort of fire that hit your building (which of course, you can't predict), then your stored materials will be melted, charred, smashed and soaked.

But how much is enough to spend on a safe? As the quote above indicates, despite the fact that you can be very dedicated to finding a way to protect yourself from fire, there is a chance that some sort of catastrophe will come that will burn not just your documents, but the safe itself! Sure, it's not likely, but it is possible.

The point of all of this is that in the midst of worrying throughout the rest of the day about the thousands of dollars of office equipment and confidential information of clients that were loaded into my car, I realized I could guarantee no safety. Everything that I own, and everything that my employer had put me in charge of, all of it had potential to be lost, damaged, stolen or destroyed. What's a person to do?

There is a principle that Jesus taught, and I think it's one of a handful of principles that have practical application for all people, not just those who believe in Christ's deity. Yet it is not such an obvious one like, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," or "Thou shalt not kill." In Matthew 6, Jesus said,

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I think most people think of this as a spiritual thing, and if you are a Christian, you definitely should, but there is a completely mundane and practical application to this. Buy yourself some fancy clothes, and eventually, they will rot away and go out of style. Buy yourself a cool car, and eventually it will break down and become a pile of scrap metal. Put your money in the bank and the bank will go under due to bad business decisions or embezzlement, the bottom will fall out of the value of the dollar, the stock market crashes and the real estate bubble bursts. Every worldly possession you have can, and eventually will go away.

But if you invest in educating children? If you invest in saving the environment? If you invest in peace, love, understanding, and all sorts of other hippy-dippy stuff like that? The return on that sort of investment is worth more than any amount of money.

A friend of mine remarked that when he watches the news these days, and sees people evacuated from fire areas, repeatedly they so often seem to cry out that they have lost "everything." He wondered to me, "Don't they still have their lives? Don't they still have their families? Don't most of them have insurance that will allow them to rebuild most if not just about all of what they did lose?" It would be a tragedy if I were to lose all those material possessions, no doubt. But so long as I have my wife, my children, and my God, I have all that I truly need. And even if I did lose my family, I would have the fond memories of the joy we shared. No fire can take that away from me.

Three...

So this morning, I made my kids some scrambled eggs for breakfast. My wife had been working on some personal projects most of the night before, and was napping on the couch while I sat with my kids eating a bowl of cereal. One of my kids looked at my cereal, turned toward my sleeping wife, and said, "Mommy, I want some of that!"

"What do you want, sweetie?" I asked, but she ignored me, shouting her request louder to my wife.

"Mommy! I want some of that!!"

It's an annoying problem that I don't want to go too far in depth in explaining, as it will likely fill the whole post before I get to making any actual point, but my daughter is simply going through an odd phase where she virtually refuses to talk to me, and directs all her verbal skills toward her mother, apparently likewise only listening to her as well. She'll only interact with me when Mommy is not around. There's something familiar about it.

When I grew up, I didn't get along with my stepfather. I would occasionally do things that annoyed him, and his response was usually to start an argument with my mother about my behavior. I always thought this was strange and obnoxious; if I'm the one causing a problem, shouldn't someone be arguing with me, or at least outright telling me to change my behavior? Because of this, I tended to strongly dislike my stepfather, and I assumed he strongly disliked me.

Then, when I was in high school, my mother took a multi-week trip to Russia, leaving me alone with him. I thought it would be awful, and you know what? It wasn't. My stepfather and I had a great time! For that time we were alone, we were like best buddies. We had barbecues, watched movies, and I'm not sure, but I seem to vaguely recall going to a sporting event of some sort. I wondered, have I reached some sort of level of maturity that is allowing me to get along with my dad in some way? Then, the very day my mother returned, they were back to arguing about my behavior.

I love my mom. I assume my mom loved my stepdad, since she married him and stayed with him for an awfully long time (and although divorced today, they're still friends). I found out within that short amount of time that my stepdad apparently loved me. Why could the three of us never get along together?

I found out recently that psychologists call this phenomenon "triangulation". It's the invisible social force that sometimes makes any three people able to get along very well in pairs, but miserable when all together. My wife does fine with our kids on her own, I do fine with them on my own, and when my wife and I can find the time to slip away alone, we greatly enjoy each other's company. Put us all together, and everybody is prone to losing their temper and committing antisocial acts all of a sudden. Apparently some close relationships strengthen each other, while others grate on each other in an odd way.

Well, the above is a well-known phenomenon, or at least I assume so if it's been named by psychologists. What interests me about this, and why I include it in my blog here about religion, is that it's been my experience from my early days of being a Christian that some people experience triangulation with God.

One of my closest friends in the early days of my being a Christian was a guy who considered himself to be a Zen Buddhist. It was always fascinating to me the way it was often easier to discuss theology with a Buddhist than with a fellow Christian. It's part and parcel of the phenomenon I noted in the first post of my other blog. Christians sometimes collectively nod their heads and say, "Isn't it great we all agree?" and move on, but if someone sticks their neck out and says, "but I don't agree," or sometimes even just, "I'm not sure I agree," then trouble can ensue. When I discuss theology with a Buddhist, I run virtually no risk of offending him, because we already understand we don't agree before we uncover the full nature of our disagreements.

Isn't this a matter, as I said above, of "triangulation with God?" Person A says, "I have such a close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ." Person B says, "Me, too!" Then they find out that A is a Catholic and B is a Methodist or something along those lines, and everything unravels. Mathematically/logically, we understand that if A is close to C and B is close to C, then A ought to be close to B.

But how could someone possibly believe that infants should be baptized? How could one possibly not baptize infants? Jesus' mother was an eternal virgin? Preposterous! But it's always been believed to be so; how could one go against centuries of tradition? You mean you believe in the Bible, but don't go to a formalized church with a big, fancy building?! Why does your minister wear those funny clothes, does he think he's better than everyone else? And on and on...

It's funny, but a few years ago, I was taking a computer programming class from a Muslim instructor, and over the course of various class breaks, we discovered to our mutual delight how many beliefs Christians and Muslims share. Sure, both of us know that we are of two separate religions, neither of which will accept the truth of the other, at least in full; but because of the distance that we know exists between our faiths, finding common ground of any sort was almost cause for celebration. When you're talking with someone you assume to have the same position as you, it's the discovery of differences that's notable. I wonder if it happens among atheists as well? (There was a time that I considered myself an "atheist", but probably my beliefs would have been better labeled "deist". Would such a revelation to an atheist friend have been cause for shock?)

My kids are only two years old. They don't have the maturity to do better than they are, and I understand that. My stepfather probably had some maturity problems, and honestly, some of my current situation is probably caused by my own shortcomings in various ways that I'm never fully aware of. Yes, adults aren't immune from maturity issues, probably especially those of us who so strongly deny that it's possible in ourselves.

Can Christians and other religions learn to be mature enough to live together in peace, despite our smaller differences? I don't know. Certainly, from what I gather in the news about Iraq, one of the biggest problem is not between Iraqis and Americans (although there's no denying there's quite a bit of tension there), but between differing Muslim sects.

At least in America, we're not blowing up each other's churches for our disagreements (at least, not to the degree it's happening there). Still, I'd tend to think Jesus expects more of us than simply not killing each other. My own church split in two this last year, not due to theological differences, but administrative staffing issues. As Jesus said in Matthew 5:47, "And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?" Maybe pagans are doing better than us, Lord. What kind of witness is that?

'Tis the season to be complaining

It wasn't the subject of this weekend's sermon at church, but it was mentioned. What the heck is the deal with the fact that sales associates in stores will not wish you a "Merry Christmas", but insist on "Happy Holidays"? I've been hearing a lot about it this year in particular, and it does seem to be rampant this year for unknown reasons, although maybe it's just that my attention has been drawn to it.

Still, Saturday morning I was sitting with my kids watching "Blue's Clues", their favorite show (and really an excellent one), and it was a holiday episode. It was definitely not a Christmas episode, repeatedly Joe wished the viewers "Happy Holidays", they exchanged "Holiday presents" and in the mail, Joe got a "Holiday card". The card was also an oddity, in that it featured four kids (for those not familiar with this children's program, the "mail" is pretty much always a video segment) who were each celebrating the holidays in their own way. One was celebrating Chanukkah, one celebrating Kwanzaa, one celebrating Ramadan, and one actually celebrating Christmas. I like the idea of not only featuring all of these holidays but making it clear that they are not different versions of the same holiday. (I was always irked as a Jewish child when teachers in school would tell students that Chanukkah was the "Jewish Christmas", a ridiculous concept.) Oddly enough, though, each kid had their own segment of the video to explain their holiday and its meaning but the kid celebrating Christmas. Not even a "secular" Christmas explanation.

You know "secular" Christmas. It's what I always celebrated with my mother at her house as a child. My Jewish father didn't like the idea of his son celebrating Christmas, and while it's understandable, I had no idea that Christmas was supposed to have anything to do with Christ; I had no idea who Christ was, actually. Christmas for my family and for many others means a tree with little glass globes hanging on it, lots of candy, maybe a wreath on the door, and then on the actual day, we get lots of toys. What does any of that have to do with Christ?

As a Christian now, what I often hear around this time of year is that we've forgotten the "true meaning of Christmas". Those are meant to be ironic quotes, in case you couldn't tell. That phrase gets tossed around a lot, and there's no consensus on what the "true meaning" actually is. Watch five Christmas movies and see five different definitions of what it is:

• Being with family
• Helping the poor
• Believing in Santa Claus
• Giving, not receiving
• Peace on Earth

Everyone seems so sure that their idea of what Christmas is about is the "true meaning", and a lot of Christians seem to grind their teeth and grumble, "Sheesh, I thought it was about Jesus..." The fact is, all of the above things are fine and dandy (even believing in Santa Claus, for various reasons), and there's little or no reason to complain about them per se. Still, I suppose as a Christian one might wish that Christ could get more attention, especially on the holiday that is named after Him and is designed to be the commemoration of His birth. but still, what's the point in complaining?

Aside from the fact that Jesus almost certainly wasn't born on December 25th (a fact that ought to come as a surprise to very few people) and so it's really an artificial holiday that the Catholic Church stole from the Pagans sometime in the 4th century more or less, there is a question that lingers in the back of my mind year after year and came to full surface this year. At the risk of piling another level of complaint on top of what's already there: what gives?

Maybe I'm missing something by being in a church short on liturgy, or maybe not, but even as a person who believes in the truth of the Bible and wishes to use the date of December 25th to commemorate the events of Luke chapter 2, what the heck is the "true meaning of Christmas"? Peek in the window of my house, and you'd see the tree with the lights and little glass balls, and stockings hung on the bookshelf (no fireplace available), and wrapped presents for the children. Frankly, it doesn't look much different from what most non-Christian houses are probably looking like.

I enjoy getting into the "spirit" of Christmas with my wife; shopping for the tree, putting up lights, making cookie treats and the like. But all the time I was going through that string of tree lights looking for the burned-out bulbs so that the tree could look picture-perfect, I was thinking, "I'm spending hours this month doing stuff of no clear significance, when I can barely seem to find time to sit quietly and read the Bible. Is this right?"

Maybe the "true meaning of Christmas" is not to be found in chapter two, but in chapter 10;

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!"

"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

Is honoring Christ all about busying yourself to make everything fancy and nice, or is it taking the time to sit at His feet, listening to what He has to say to you? Yeah, as so many people point out about the story above, somebody had to make the meal, right? Thank God for the Marthas out there who are always working to be gracious hostesses. But in the midst of all the craziness of shopping for presents and making holiday meals, I hope everyone will have a time to stop complaining about how they seem to be the only person around who cares about making Christmas what it should be, and takes time to just sit down, relax, and hear what God has to say.

And that goes for people of any religion. Happy Holidays.