Ambidextrous, or undextrous, issues

Quiz: Is the following a right-wing or a left-wing statement?

"Raising children shouldn't have to be a counter-cultural exercise"

Alternately, was that a liberal or a conservative statement?

1. Right-wing/conservative
2. Left-wing/liberal.
3. Neither.
4. You have heard that it was said, "there are no dumb questions." But I say to you, this one is dumb; it's got nothing to do with left or right.

I first heard this (the question, not the answers) from Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics—a terrific speaker by the way. His point: many things we care about aren't a matter of left or right. Here's another one:

The younger teen heard about the "post secrets" website. I'm not sure about the spelling, but the premise is that people write their "secrets" (loosely defined) on postcards and send them, anonymously, to this guy. He posts some on his site, and I believe he has a book or two. One postcard had small images of magazine covers -- Cosmopolitan and the like. Scrawled next to them was this message:

I will subscribe if your magazine ever says I don't have to have sex with whoever comes along.

Another right-wing nutcase? I don't think so. Donna Freitas, BU professor and author of Sex and the Soul, was interviewed recently in Christianity Today; (the Winston-Salem Journal also interviewed her; article here). She comments that almost everyone (whether male or female) is dissatisfied with the "hook-up" culture of commitment-free sex. A self-identified liberal feminist, Professor Freitas is no right-wing anything, though she teaches from Shallit's Return to Modesty and its ilk. The CT interview quotes her saying collegiate sexual behavior really isn't a left/right issue.

As a father of teen-age daughters, I'm somewhat terrified about the atmosphere at non-evangelical colleges (according to Freitas's interviews of an admittedly small sample of colleges, sexual attitudes and behavior are bi-modal: evangelical schools are extremely restrained, and the others -- including Catholic schools -- are sexually very indulgent). Yeah, I know, I'm a right-wing nutcase. By the way, it was a mistake to invade Iraq; the government should get involved in lowering health care costs; and we should raise taxes in California right now to relieve the squeeze on essential services! (Uh, make that a left-wing nutcase.)

Seriously, though, we have a real problem in this country with dialogue on substantive issues. Sex, health care, child-rearing, poverty -- even the abortion rate -- are not really left/right issues, but we've let the politicians make them so. And by the way, as Wallis says, both left- and right-leaning politicians "get it wrong" when it comes to God. More important than left or right is -- well, let me take a line from E. Stanley Jones:

Whose you are, not who you are, is the most important question in anyone's life.

As indeed it is. The problems we face are largely not left/right issues. "Ambidextrous" isn't quite correct either (my brother-in-law points out that the "dextrous" there means "right"). Un-handed?

As Wallis says, they're human issues, not left- or right-wing issues. So what can we do? One thing is to treat each other as beings made in the image of God, not economic units or as means to self-fulfillment. To try to be awake rather than sleepwalking through life. To be mindful...

Saturday report, and a counter-cultural view of temptation

Well, I did a bunch of stuff, but until the evening didn't get to the one thing that I really had to do! Things accomplished:

• consolidated two mailing-lists for our church's outreach to international adults.
• discovered that when Mi¢ro$oft Word puts a "comment-box", OpenOffice shows only a teeny yellow rectangle. NeoOffice too.
  • found a used copy of M$ Word on ebay, and ordered it (via "buy it now"). I don't mind this so much since M$ already got their money from the original purchase -- my money won't support their dirty tricks (more here, here, here, here and here).
• fixed the teens' bedroom door (it was sticking, and wouldn't actually latch closed);
• helped the younger teen rearrange the "studio" -- removed doors from a wardrobe/closet thing, and moved some furniture around
• hung a laundry pole in the back yard (strung between the house and the detached garage)

The one thing I should have done? Prepare the lesson for today! I'm teaching the middle schoolers at our church's San Mateo campus. The passage is Matthew 6:12-15 -- actually I was assigned just 6:13, but as you probably know by now, I don't think you can really know what a verse is saying outside of its context.

Now I know that this song from "My Fair Lady" isn't really representative of the culture, but the phrase "sinfully delicious", which has appeared in a pile of ads, got about 116,000 hits on Google when I tried it just now.

Sorry, I wasn't going to mention that to the kids. Here's some of what I'm thinking to tell them about, approximately 150 minutes hence:

• Why do we have to pray that? I mean, is God like planning to lead us into temptation, but if we pray that he won't?
  I don't think that's it. Earlier in the chapter, Jesus says that "your father knows what you need before you ask" -- therefore I think this prayer isn't for his benefit. Whose then? Yours -- or mine, when I pray it. Praying this will help me to have the attitude that temptation is something to be avoided.
  
  This reminds me of the part in The Karate Kid where the kid is ordered to paint the fence and wax the car. He thinks he's doing a bunch of work for free, but he's actually getting the muscle tone &c that he needs to become a karate champ. Here, Jesus tells us to ask God for this, but the point is to change our hearts and our way of thinking -- not to change what God is going to do. (Randy Pausch, who died Friday, called this a "head fake.")

  What does "but" mean there in the middle of verse 13?   —and—
  Is there a particular kind of temptation he's talking about?

  To understand verse 13, take a look at verses 12 and 14, or in this case 12-15 -- or even better, verses 5-15.
  
  The way I figure it, the sequence of

  • forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors
  • lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one
  • for if you forgive... your father will forgive, but if you do not forgive... your father will not forgive

  is no accident. Notice the word "but": I think that "your father will forgive" goes with "deliver us from the evil (one)"

  So Jesus seems to think it's really important to forgive others. What does that look like? If my friend borrows $10 and later pretends to have forgotten, and I forgive him, does that mean if he asks me for $20 tomorrow I should pretend it never happened?

  That's a really good question. I think you can accept past injury without inviting more injury of the same kind from the same person. Put differently, you can forgive without being a doormat.

Well, that was my shot at it. I'll let you know how it goes.

1pm Update: How it went

Not a lot of interaction from the kids, but I did get some -- which our youth pastor thought was typical. I had a nice talk with a charming brother-sister pair, both seem engaged with the discipleship process; the brother is entering 9th grade this fall, told me about his family life and school and his thoughts about the future.

So it went OK. Our youth pastor preached in "big church" at our San Mateo campus, and did a stellar job. They recorded it but I don't think the MP3 will be generally available.

unclogging a slow (not blocked) toilet

So the toilet started slowing down. I mean, it didn't overflow -- it just looked like it was going to. I tried emptying buckets of hot water into the toilet, hoping that it would melt any grease that might be causing the slowdown... but no joy.

I have a 15-foot "snake" that looks something like this one but I couldn't get it to go where I needed it to.

After reading a fix-it-yourself book and talking to Pat (aka "The Man"), I decided I needed a toilet auger, so I got one from Home Depot for $7.65 plus tax. It looked approximately like this. These things are terrific because you can push the elbow-shaped pipe into the right place, then feed the cable with the auger-end into just the right place. (If that link doesn't work, try this article. Note, however, that their text apparently came from a different kind of unclogging operation!)

Anyway, I fed the toilet auger into the toilet, and pushed and pulled the cable a few times, and pretty soon got the impression that something was getting broken up. You really don't want any more details than that.

A pail of cold water went right down, and everything was happy after that. I went outside and sprayed off both the snake and the toilet auger with the hose, then with WD-40.

I love a successful home repair; it makes me feel like a Real Man.

here's my caption...

We found this snapshot of Jenny in an old box, and I tried to figure out what the expression on her face meant. Here's what I came up with:

"Daddy, somebody told me today that it's possible for a function to be everywhere differentiable but that the derivative need not be continuous. Can that possibly be right?"

What is my purpose? part 2

Part 1 was more or less about the purpose for humans in general, which I think we must at least consider (if not fully answer) to provide some context for the question "What is my purpose in particular?"

Which could mean any of at least the following:

1. For what purpose was I born? Why was I put on this earth?
2. What do I want to do with my life?
3. What is the vision, if any, I'm striving toward? What would an objective observer reasonably conclude about my life's real values and priorities, based upon what I actually say and do?

I was thinking about #1 when I started writing this, but of course #2 is also a reasonable question. And essays like this one point out that #3 is may be useful when thinking about the aim of one particular life. That is, in order to answer "Which way to steer?" we need to know both where we're currently headed(#3) as well as where we want to go(#2).

Let me make a few suggestions about #2 and #3 first, then I'd like to talk about #1. There's a thought-experiment that I sometimes call the "man from Mars," which I ran on myself a few years ago, which I suppose constituted my #3 at the time.

Covey's Seven Habits starts off with "Begin with the end in mind." I've often used this -- "Imagine you're at the end of your career (or life)," I begin. "What do you want to see as you look back?" These sorts of questions are great ways to think about #2.

By the way, though I really like Covey's "7 Habits", it seems to send the overall message: "Be a good and wise person" but it doesn't show us how to do that. What we need -- rather who we need -- is a relationship with our creator and redeemer. Otherwise our defensiveness and denial and so on will dog our steps and make it impossible to be as wise or as good as we ought to be. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," say the Proverbs

As for question #1: why was this particular person put in this place at this time? Well, right now I'm out of time. More on that in part 3

What is my purpose? part 1

The elder teen tells me one of her friends has been wondering about the purpose of his life -- something I started wondering at that age. I've never read Aristotle (What??!?) but my mother told me some decades ago that purpose was tied to the intention of something's creator. Or maybe it was the user.

What is the purpose of a chair? To the manufacturer, there could be any number of them:

• provide functional, comfortable seating for the buyer;
• provide elegant, beautiful seating to impress the buyer's visitors;
• make a profit;
• get buyers started on the manufacturer's line of furniture;

etc. Whether the chair is successful in its purpose is measured by the manufacturer.

The buyer may have a slightly different (or completely different) set of purposes for the chair:

• something to sit in
• prop for a dramatic presentation
• for certain Microsoft executives, something to throw across the room to express his desire to crush a competitor (I'm not making this up)
• something to tie a kidnap victim to

etc. The maker's purposes can unfortunately be perverted or corrupted.

Fine, but people aren't chairs! The chair had its essence before its existence; humans are different.

Or are they?

If life and consciousness appeared as a product of unguided accidents compounded upon each other, then there is no objective reality upon which one could base a judgment. (The problem is even worse, but that's another discussion.) Suppose "Mr. A" decided that his purpose was to kill six million (or twelve million) innocent civilians in his country, and "Mr. B" decided to save a comparable number of lives in some other country, upon what basis would one say that one purpose was better or worse than another? (By the way, Mr. B is one of my heroes; he started the green revolution in Central and South America, and has probably saved a billion lives.)

Of course Mr. B's purpose was nobler than Mr. A's, but why? If human lives are just so many random accidents, what makes them valuable? What makes them worth anything at all? The statistical dollar value of an American life is only what the economy (a user of human lives) thinks; it is a perversion of what God (the maker of human lives) intended.

My claim here is that unless we admit there's a creator, a designer, a maker of humanity, then one purpose is as "good" as another. Utilitarianism, the Categorical Imperative, etc., all assume some value system, and the basis of that value system is suspect if it doesn't include the designer's intention.

So suppose there is a designer (or that there was a designer, if you prefer). This raises the question, "What was the designer's original purpose?" And a second question, "What, if any, changes have occurred in the designer's purpose?"

My train ride is almost over, so I'll include a little from Genesis 1:

then God said, "Let us make man in our own image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over the beasts of the earth." ... And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea" (etc.)

Well, I think we've filled and subdued the earth. About ruling over other living things, well, maybe we're not so hot at that.

Well, that's a start; I actually have a day job so I'd better get to it. More later...

Spiritual Friendships - questions, mostly

The lovely Carol bought a book titled Spiritual Mentoring, which has a whole lot more than the questions I've rearranged and paraphrased below. This has been of particular interest to me lately, as I've heard that spiritual friendships are a key ingredient, if not the key ingredient, in spiritual growth. I also know some young people who consider me some sort of mentor, so I thought it might be well to be a little more intentional about these things. So here are some key thoughts (they're not all questions) from the book.

---

Survey, history:

• Where am I headed?
  • Who created a safe space for me to tell my story?
    
  • Whose song of faith, what song of faith, has rung powerfully in my life?
    
  • Whose life do I want to imitate/emulate?
  
  
• What do I want?
  
  • What is a key experience you've had? Key relationship?
    
  • What is a personal fear or weakness?
    
  • If you could wave a magic wand, how would you change your life?

Reflecting upon a particular moment or situation:

• What is God up to in this situation?
  
• Where is God's hand at work in this?
  
• What sacred text is to be read in the moment before us?
  
• What might these ordinary moments contain of the God dimension?

A mix of past and present

• Have you noticed a pattern of God's movement in your life?
  
• Did you consider what God might be saying to you in the questions you raise?
  
• What might God want you to hear in the events of your life?

Paradigmatic questions:

• Where was God when...
  
• Who am I?
  
• What does God want to do with me now?

Prerequisites; terms of reference:
NOTE: These aren't questions (d'oh!)

• safe space where you can be open
  
• boundaries: confidentiality, structure, guidance
  
  • i won't tell anyone about your situation
    
  • not to waste your time
    
  • won't tell you what to do but will suggest
    
• questions, struggles, emotions, doubts are acceptable!
  
• ideas, curiosity, wonder, joy are to be shared
  
• the mundane is a container of holy grace

For weekly updates:

• What were the highs and lows of your week?
  
• Were you faithful to follow the disciplines you committed to last week?
  
• What have you heard God saying to you in the experiences of your week?