And it was good

Today was a day of rest. It definitely wasn’t in accordance with the Shabbat or Sabbath guidelines, but it was a day of doing nothing but resting my soul and enjoying time with family. I slept late, read some Peter Rollins, had lunch with my sweetie, took a short nap, read some more Peter Rollins, and watched ‘Blues Brothers’ with Beth and Jake. Not a day to check off a lot tasks, but definitely a day I needed. You see, I must confess that I have this need to be busy doing things. It may seem odd that I use the word “confess,” but I believe this need that drives me to be constantly occupied draws my attention to the wrong things. I remember hearing Bill McDonald speak about not letting the important things get in the way of heavenly things. He wasn’t talking about the temptation and sin of the world getting in the way of a relationship with God. He was talking about good things that need to be done getting in the way of heavenly things God is calling us to. It’s the trap I fall into over and over again. Today I crawled out of that trap.

God, that really freaked me out…

I had to go down to Florida last week for some meetings. Thursday night I was able to sit outside for a while to enjoy the mid-70s temperatures after supper. Something led my thoughts down the path of helping those in need. A couple of friends had recently shared stories about assisting total strangers with very specific needs. It appeared that God had placed them in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. I started to wonder why I never get the opportunity to help people like that. Is it because I don’t take the time to notice folks around me in need? Or, is it because I let my cynical side get in the way of my hospitality? I decided I didn’t have the answer, so I resorted to where I always turn when logic and reason fail: prayer. I just honestly asked God to open my eyes so I could see folks in need. I asked for the opportunity to help folks while allowing Him to get the credit. OK, so if your foreshadowing alarm isn’t going off right now, you should get it checked…or start reading something besides those creepy Japanese manga comics. So, I headed for my hotel and stopped for gas, not more than a half hour after finishing my prayer. While standing there in the standard “waiting for the pump to finish” pose, a dude pulls up in a well-worn minivan. He asked me if I was from the area, so I figured he was looking for directions. As I started to explain that I wouldn’t be much help in getting him where he wanted to go, he interrupted to say he was trying to get to Ft Pierce to start a new job when his van broke down. He had spent the last of his cash to buy a new fan belt and needed $10.70 to gain access to the infamous Florida Turnpike. Wow, talk about answered prayers. Of course, I helped him out with the needed cash, plus told him the short version of how I believe God put us together so God could get the credit he deserved. He headed out of the gas station and I stood there for a moment feeling pretty freaked out. I think Mr. Beaver said it best with his comment about Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe, but he’s good.” I don’t want to serve a safe God. I want to serve a God that is good and also likes to freak me out every once in a while.

Orange Kool-Aid

Orange Kool-Aid has been disgusting for as long as I can remember. Mom would rotate through the packets she kept stored in the cabinet and I always dreaded when the Kool-Aid roulette fell on orange. That meant I had to suffer through drinking the nasty orange concoction until it was gone and the next flavor made its appearance. The orange Kool-Aid days always passed slowly as I watched the pitcher drain. Unquenched and struggling for survival, my only hope was to encourage my brother and sister to gulp more down.

To me, it just didn’t taste orange. In my young mind, orange should taste like oranges or at least something citrus-like. Orange Kool-Aid tasted like nothing orange or orange-related that I had ever experienced. It simply tasted like it was lacking.

Today I made some punch that required orange Kool-Aid. It didn’t require an entire pitcher of orange Kool-Aid, so I was left with about a quart. On a whim, I decided to sample the leftovers and found it to be quite delicious. This leaves me in quite a muddled state of affairs. Did Mom have a mental block when it came to the orange Kool-Aid formula? Are my childhood memories flawed? Could my tastes have changed? Have I been wrong all these years?

Why do Fruit Loops clump together by color?

I took this picture at camp this summer because I thought it was weird how the same colored Fruit Loops ended up together. After a little research, I discovered it’s not just coincidence. The basic cereal/grain composition of each little Fruit Loop is the same. However, the addition of coloring and flavoring alters the chemistry of the different colors. So, all the yellow Loops have the same chemical properties (and so on for each of the other colors). Once you know that, you just need to understand a little about molecules and the way they interact to solve the clumping mystery. Each atom in a molecule has a little cloud of electrons whirring around a cluster of protons and neutrons. The electrons are very ordered in the way they are structured, orbiting at different heights. The orbits are called shells and the number of electrons in each shell has a minimum and maximum. If the number of electrons in the shell is near the minimum, then the molecule wants extra electrons to fill its shell. If the number of electrons in the shell is near the maximum, then the molecule doesn’t want extra electrons to fill its shell. In simpler terms, a molecule needing electrons has a strong pull and a molecule not needing electrons has a weak pull. If we apply this to the Fruit Loops, the colors using chemicals with the strong electron pull tend to clump together (green and blue-green in the picture). The colors using chemicals without a strong pull are simply pushed out of the way by the stronger attraction of the other colors and appear randomly located (yellow and red in the picture). So, why don’t the colors come out of the box together? The final piece of this puzzle happens when you add milk. In this part of the mystery, we have to shift from chemistry to physics and our old friend friction. While dry in the box, there is simply too much friction for the electron force to have any effect. However, Fruit Loops in milk float and therefore have very little friction. So, when you reach the level where the Fruit Loops are mostly floating in the milk and have enough space to move around, you will see colors clump together. This only holds true if you don’t eat them too quickly.

What can we learn from our little science lesson? Well, the most obvious thing is that if you believe Fruit Loops clump in a bowl due to the forces exerted by their electron shells, you’ll probably believe anything that sounds even remotely scientific. You probably also believe the toilet spins the other direction south of the equator and that Al Gore is a scientist. Remember, just because someone throws out a bunch of technical terms doesn’t mean logic was applied.

Have you ever heard anyone say, “My Cheerios are clumping together in specific patterns?” Of course not. That’s because our senses don’t pick up the minute differences between individual Cheerios. Our brain simplifies a bowl of Cheerios with very slight differences into a mass of tiny brown circles. The reason Fruit Loops clump by colors is because our eyes see the colors and our brain realizes a pattern. We see colors we have already learned and recognize, and then we organize the random scattering of colors into patterns. Our brains desperately want to capture and organize information to simplify the world around us so it can focus on important things like personal safety and fantasy football statistics. If we committed all the resources in our brain to studying Fruit Loop colors, we’d probably end up stabbing the spoon in our eye.

So, here’s the million dollar question: What other patterns are you seeing in your life that aren’t real? Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly capturing and organizing the colors and patterns of all the Fruit Loops swirling around us every day in this giant cereal bowl that we call our life. Think about the patterns you are comprehending and how those patterns make you behave…and get that spoon away from your eye.

Dreams and meanings

One of the guys I used to work with was a big believer in dream interpretation. He was convinced that the objects and happenings in our dreams were metaphors for real events going on in our lives. Whenever someone would have a weird dream, he would drag out this dream interpretation paperback that listed what things meant and psychoanalyze our lives. Of course, we started messing with him after we saw how serious he was about it, so he got to where he wouldn’t even discuss dreams. All of this came back to me recently as I began wondering about the implications of recent dream.

In this dream, I was stuck in some poorly made horror movie. There were several people I knew in the dream and we were in a big crowd scene. Each person in the crowd had an opposing villain that was attempting to torment their prey. My villain was a sinister clown-type guy with a bunch of little marbles on strings. I’m not really sure of the intended purpose of this device and I don’t remember being particularly afraid of the device during the dream. However, I recognized this fellow was a bad guy and likely had extremely sinister plans for his undefined device. While attempting to find something to defend myself with, I found pool ball in my pocket and threw at him. Surprisingly, he seemed terrified of my newly discovered weapon and even more surprisingly, I found an endless supply of pool balls in my pocket. Every time I stuck my hand in my pocket, a pool ball was ready for the taking. So, I ran after my antagonist, chucking pool balls and rallying my friends to do the same. We soon turned the tide on the villains and began to pursue them. During this pursuit, I became aware that Gary and Jake had joined with me in a sort of “let’s get ‘em boys” sort of way. At that point, I realized something astounding was about to happen because the music in the movie had morphed into the sort of triumphal, heroic melody you often hear in poorly made movies. The villains were climbing up on some kind of a loading dock and I realized this was the point in the movie where I saved the day. I reached into my pocket and retrieved the decisive pool ball. I could tell by the way this particular ball felt in my hand that I held an object capable of changing the course of the universe. The stars were aligned and the villains were arrayed on the loading dock in such a fashion that this one pool ball would bring their demise. As I began my throwing motion, I realized that I was unable to raise my arm. At first I thought some evil force might be restraining me, but I came to the realization it was simply because Jake was standing too close and I didn’t have room to raise my arm. As a result, the villains escaped and were able to regroup, as villains are often fond of doing. Luckily, Jake and I were able to make our escape when we flagged down my parents as they drove by. Feeling relieved at being out of this sinister location, I was soon horrified to look back and see we were being pursued by a maniac on a motorcycle. We got stuck in traffic, which worked to the advantage of the maniac on the motorcycle since he was able to zig and zag through traffic. As he drew near, Mom started unlocking the car doors in case we needed to escape. I keep re-locking the doors while trying to explain the benefits of locked doors, i.e., keeping the maniac outside the vehicle. We were finally able pull out of traffic onto a country road and began to speed away with the maniac in pursuit. I noticed Pop was swerving all over the road and when I looked forward, he was messing with the overhead console. When I questioned him about the unnecessary messing and swerving, he stated he was trying to cancel his On Star service since he didn’t really need it. I questioned the validity of his decision, to which he responded with a challenge to name one reason to keep the service. I screamed, “Because there is a maniac on a motorcycle chasing us and it would be nice to be able to contact someone to say, ‘Help! There’s a maniac on a motorcycle chasing us!’ “

That’s all I remember from the dream unfortunately. No epic battle. No conquering hero. Just a trailing off into nothingness as the maniac on a motorcycle drew nearer. So, any of you amateur psychologists want to take a crack at interpreting this dream for me?

Mystery photo!

David Arthur has been posting mystery photos on Facebook to see if we can figure out the subject matter. His photos are cropped to a size that doesn’t fully show the entire subject or taken from an angle that makes the subject look unusual. I really like his mystery photos because they make you think. Here’s my own version of David’s mystery photo puzzler:

For one thing, it’s easy to see I’m not as photographically skilled as David. He’s got serious skills plus a lot of good equipment. I’m just a point-and-shoot guy with a beat-up pocket camera. As a result, it probably didn’t take most folks long to see that it was the outside of a stained glass window. The shapes are all visible, but the image is reversed and the colors are all muted. It’s not really much of a puzzler, but would anything make you take notice of that window if you were walking past? Would anything about it reach out to you and make you think about God’s love or grace? Here’s a different view:

The view from the inside is spectacular. The light reveals the colors of the glass and brings life to the image. The mind immediately begins to look for the meaning of the haloed figure bowing at the center…the pitcher and bowl…the cross. There are so many details that just aren’t visible from the outside. The only difference is the lighting. The beauty and color are always there, but folks can only see it if the light shines through. This is a great analogy for our lives. Sometimes we let people see the beautiful details and other times all they see are muted colors and vague shapes. Which side of the window are we showing the world?

Funeral Home

We went to visitation at the funeral home last night for one of our neighbors. Out on our road, lots of folks have lived at the same place for lots of years and a good number of them are related. That means folks know each other and care about each other. We saw it in action when our house flooded and they came out in force to help us. My point is that a funeral home viewing means a good number of folks from our neighborhood will be there. I chatted with our neighbor Marsha about what was going on with our families and all the rain we’ve been getting. As we finished our conversation, I told her it was good to talk to her instead of just waving as we pass. We agreed that life keeps us too busy to think about stopping to catch up with a neighbor. We’re always running to the bank before it closes or some other thing that seems important. That’s a real shame because life is too short to just be busy and neighbors are too important to drive by and just wave.

DC

I’m in DC this week and had to stay in “DC proper” instead of Arlington due to a lack of availability at the hotels where I normally stay. I got back to my hotel in time to do some walking around tonight before it got late. I walked down to the White House and sat on a park bench across the street to watch for a while.

I saw a woman change from her flip-flops to leopard print high heels before having her picture taken in front of White House. I’m sure it was important to her, but it seemed rather silly to me. Will anyone really notice her shoes when she shows off those pictures?

I thought I saw Barney Frank talking to a film crew, but I don’t believe it was really him. The guy did look an awfully lot like him, just not as old and gray. Then I wondered: was that just a coincidence or does this guy intentionally try to look like Barney Frank? It would take a truly weird person to want to look like an eccentric character like Frank, but DC is full of truly weird people.

Two guys in ankle-length oilskin coats, Indiana Jones hats, and huge walking sticks (probably four inch diameter and seven feet long) walked up to peer through the fence. They looked like they had just walked out of the Outback…the continent, not the restaurant.

Of course there were lots of tourists. Some were stereotypical like the huge group of Asians that I originally thought was a protest march. Others were more unusual like the group of wheelchair-bound folks in white shirts and bright red caps, each being pushed by a person wearing a white shirt and bright red cap. Mostly though, it was just regular folks who wanted to take a look at the White House. It was one of these families that really made me appreciate being there. Their two children were bickering as they sat at the base of the White House fence. They were behaving like regular kids right in front of the residence of the President of the United States where decisions about the course of world events are being formulated. We live in a pretty stinkin’ cool country.

Curt, the idiot boy

Hiatus: \hī-ˈā-təs\ Function: noun, Etymology: Latin, from hiare to yawn, 1a: an interruption in time or continuity: break; especially: a period when something (as a program or activity) is suspended or interrupted

I have taken an unintentional hiatus from blogging this summer. The busy start to the summer caught me off guard and the summer was half gone before I realized I hadn’t taken the time to share any of my thoughts. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking all summer. God led me to some important things this summer. Here’s the most important lesson I think God showed me this summer…

This is kind of difficult for me to share because it highlights part of my personality I like to pretend doesn’t exist. I want everyone to see the nice, smiling Curt and keep Curt the idiot boy in the shadows. At a youth event this summer, there was a kid who was a real pain. You could say his annoyance capacity was unbounded. He also had some peculiarities that made him an easy target, so I joined right in when it came to making fun of him. Circumstances led me spend a little time one-on-one with him and he told me about his life. His dad died of a drug overdose, his mom doesn’t pay attention to him, and his stepdad is emotionally abusive. After sitting with him for just a few minutes, I realized his life was pretty crappy and I wasn’t loving him like God was calling me to love him. Afterwards, I got mad at myself for being so self-focused and wrote this prayer:

“Why does life have to suck so bad sometimes? It’s so unfair and on top of it I’m a coldhearted jerk to the people who need me. Lord, help me get past myself and my need to be funny all the time. Save me from myself. Help me see people like you see people. Help me love people like you love people.”

I wrote it out so I could keep a record of Curt being a self-absorbed idiot. I keep this prayer close so I have to look at it occasionally, with the hope that it keeps me humble. Save me from myself, Lord.

Death of MySpace Curt

I’m pulling the plug on myspace Curt. He really never caused any problems, never complained of neglect, never uttered a word of protest. That’s mostly because he just stood in the corner unnoticed. So, I’m not killing him off because he was doing bad things, but because he never did many good things. He ignored friend requests, didn’t return happy messages, and took no notice at all of birthdays. In all honesty, he was pretty much all of my negative characteristics distilled into a tiny online presence. I’ve grown tired of him, so I’m giving him up in exchange for more time for face-to-face conversations and laughing with friends. So, goodbye to my ignored myspace friends… And you better be watching yourself there, Facebook Curt. I don’t like your attitude some days. You may be next.