Moving sites

The blog still lives, but just at a new address. I figured it was time to do something different. My new address is jimcook24.wordpress.com. Check it out.

Wake-up call

On Sunday, our pastor talked about how Advent is an alarm clock of sorts, welcoming us to new awareness. Alarm clocks stir us from slumber, and coax us to consciousness. A newborn cry from a barn put the world on notice that something had changed, that it was time to wake up to a new reality


The reality of Advent is that God made himself approachable. A little baby sparked wonder without the heart failure that had accompanied any previous message or messenger from God. Anyone can approach a baby.

Christ the savior is born! Time to wake up and meet a new day. So why do I keep hitting the snooze bar?

You don't know shit!

At the grocery store, a man in a santa hat, was proclaiming in a loud voice that one of the residents he had shuttled to the store, "shit all over the seat! That's right, there's shit all over the seat!" Laughing, he pronounced to everyone around that "they don't pay me enough money to clean up this shit!"

Old age is onerous. The body stops responding in familiar ways. Flaps and values designed to control bodily fluids don't work on command the way they did at younger ages. Leaking bodily fluids are harder to control. With body systems becoming more unmanageable, and messes more apparent, it is tough to retain a sense of dignity.

Is the van driver upset he has to clean up a mess, or terrified of a vision into his future? And if life isn't hard enough, it doesn't help having to deal with a shit-head in a santa hat!

Paying a forward forward

At a coffee shop I stepped up to the counter to order my standard small Cappuccino . The Barista looked uncomfortable as she informed me that someone had paid it forward and my Cappuccino was no cost to me. Surprised and clearly uncomfortable,  I suggested that she give it to the next person in line. She did and that person was delighted.

Why did I not take the drink? Did I not want to owe a person I never met? Did someone need it more than me? Would I appear greedy? Whatever the reason, I passed on a kindness. The world moved on carelessly.

I believe in the kindness of others, but it can be awkward to be the recipient.

In the mood

I have been accused of disliking everything Christmas. I am reluctant to hang outdoor Christmas lights, to help trim the home, and to listen to well-worn songs of the season.

Christmas is a difficult time of the year for me. It is close to a new year, with the introspection that it brings. As I get older, I look into myself, and wince at lost opportunities. I ache over damaged relationships. I see out-of-control selfishness in me that dares to be checked. In this time of Advent, attempting to focus on the coming of the Christ child into my life, I feel like a hyperactive toddler peering into the manger for a second before something else distracts me.

I can get in a Christmas mood, but it isn't always a fun mood to be in.

Reflexes

At 9:40 PM, a 22 year old woman is driving a stretch of freeway. She swerves to miss a stalled car on the shoulder, skids out of control, breaks through a mesh fence, flips over and lands, top-down, in a icy creek. She was there for 25 minutes before she was discovered, dead from undisclosed injuries.

 I can think I control my destiny, that it is in by my will that I thrive. And then a hasty compensating gesture proves us wrong.

At the cusp of life, it ends. And why? Because of a flinch.

Not in control

Friday I ate something that my body found offensive. It has been years since I last vomited. Oh, but I did Friday night! Once again my body reminded me that it is in control, not me. I received tell-tale signs that the retching was about to begin, but I was powerless to stop it. It's force squeezed tears from my eyes and brought me to my knees, gasping for breathe between the spasms.

Right now, I am captain of my ship and master of my fate, because my body hasn't found anything objectionable enough at this time to shut down the illusion.

What I seek

Today, Advent begins. It is a time of waiting for the birth of Jesus. It is a time of silence, to understand where we are, and what we are waiting for. One of the metaphors for Advent is the following of the star, leading the wise men to Jesus.

This morning, I made a commitment to focus on Advent and let the waiting lead me to Jesus. To get to the devotional web page I use, I have to click through my home page, google news. As the page loaded, a news story caught my eye. I clicked on it. From there, the links ruled.

At the outset of a new church year, I am distracted. The silence I sought was drowned out by internet links. The very thing I seek may elude me by my own doing.

These pansies are no pansies!

My wife loves to garden. On the deck she planted some pansies in a pot. As of today, they have gone through a number of killing frosts, and yet they thrive!

A person who is not strong or resilient may be called a pansy. And yet these flowers would suggest just the opposite.

So maybe we need a new name for people of weakened resilience. Maybe we shouldn't call them pansies!

Wonderings in afterlife

In the book “The Eyes of the Heart”, Frederick Buechner is having a conversation with his grandmother who died years before and is asking her about her experience of afterlife. The quote from Buechner quoting his grandmother is as follows.

"I have always assumed that when you died you would no longer see through a glass darkly but face to face as St. Paul quite inaccurately predicted. However such was not the case. On the contrary, it was like stepping out of a dark house into a greater dark of night."

She pauses for a moment, glancing up into the shadows as though they are the sky. One lens of her glasses catches the lamp's light.

"The moon' she says. "The Milky Way unwinding like a scarf, the constellations. All those fathoms upon fathoms of darkness. Who knows what other moons and stars there are further still. What deeper depths."

"You'd think it would quite take your breath away, if you had breath to take,"she says. "But it doesn't. It's almost as if it is your breath." She glances down at the pattern of cards on the table for a moment. "Or as if it's breathing you." "Eyes of the Heart" Frederick Buechner. p78.

If there was one thing that I crave as a person, it is a sense of wonder. It feels hardwired into me. A beautiful sunset, a newborn child, the vastness of the universe. I look for wonder. I long for it. I am moved by it, and sadly, when it stares me in the face, I don't know what to do with it. Most of what creates wonder in me is far beyond my grasp.

I've struggled with the visions of heaven that have been painted for me, how we would lay prostrate in rapturous delight, throwing our crowns before God, while declaring our unworthiness (well at least the 24 elders in Rev. 4:10).

I mean no sacrilege here. I understand in the puniest mortal way that I am completely insignificant in the presence of God. But it is HE who called me friend.

When I am told that I will spend my eternity throwing any crowns I have, falling on my face, and declaring my unworthiness, I wonder how that fits with what moves me now? In my own insignificant existence, wonder drives me. Wonder even drives my baser interests, which robs me of God given wonder. If wonder is something that I long for and feel I am created for, then it seems that a world of declaring my unworthiness and crown throwing, is stripped of wonder, unless, of course, God sends fresh waves of wonder through the prostrated peoples to keep up their motivation for self-abasement.

Does wonder then become how to best throw your crown to get closest to God’s feet (if he has feet)? How many skips can a crown make before it sinks to the bottom of the river that flows from the center of the city? Do we purchase crowns to throw from hawkers pushing vending carts down the golden streets? How do you throw a crown with any accuracy when you are in the prone position?

On the other hand what if heaven is a ramping up of what we know as wonder, heightening our senses, far beyond what we as mortals have been able to comprehend? What if when we move to the next level of existence, we find that we are not given the answers we were hoping to receive, but are given the capacity to see more mystery and wonder than we had any notion even existed?

What if heaven is more about wonder and less about answers? Wouldn't my discoveries drive me to worship wonder's creator even more?

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Lighting candles

Today is All-Saints day. It is a day for acknowledging loss. Those who have suffered the passing of loved ones during the year bring a candle to the front of the church to commemorate the loss.

Losing a loved one is painful There is a void where that person used to be. Losing a loved one can be more tangible than other types of loss.

How do we acknowledge the loss of less tangible things? How do we commemorate the loss of innocence, the loss of self confidence, the loss of safety, the loss of belief? How do we explain to others the loss we feel? How do we talk about something that we cannot touch or grasp?

Today on All Saints Day, I light a candle to acknowledge my loss of self confidence. I light a candle to acknowledge my loss of safety. I light a candle to acknowledge my loss of belief.

Do you see the candles I light? If you can’t maybe it’s because they are as illusory as the losses I feel.

No easy answers

The Somali pirating drama illustrates to me how there are no easy answers.

I was sent this article, "Those who forget the past are condemned"  The writer of this article did their homework and there are a lot of things that are documented from history. 

I read this article this morning,  "Suspected pirate a world away from home."

There are no easy answers. It seems to me, it is dangerous to flip to either extreme. The answer isn't to hide behind labels of jihadist pirate, or destitute victim. To lean to the attack stance ignores the tragedy of poverty that many people endure on an on-going basis, and the appeal someone could have flashing a little cash around. On the victim side, it is easy to get soft on bad people and ignore that there are truly evil people in the world intent of destroying the west.

The real danger, I think, is painting with too broad a brush. What we may cover up is the truth.

The will of Dog

Today my wife was eating a cinnamon roll. Our toy poodle stared at the pastry as if by the force of her desire she could compel the food to come her way. She stared as sections were broken off and consumed.

She did recieve bite-sized scraps to insure her digestive track didn't receive too large a shock. Once the roll was eaten, she had to be content from what she consumed.

My dog's behavior looks a lot like me. There are things I want that I may or may not get, but I stare at them none the less, hoping that my will will send my desires my way. The truth is that if I got what I wanted, if I got to eat the whole "cinnamon roll" it wouldn't make me feel any more content. In fact, it may create in me a stronger sense of discontentment, because it would remove one more thing that I believed would make me happy, and I realize after I got the prize, that I'm still not happy.

Another word about wonder

As I thought more about what I wrote in the last post, another thought crossed my mind. Jesus said that unless you accept God's kingdom with the simplicity of a child, you'll never get in. (Mark 10:13-16 The Message)

As a parent I think my favorite age of my children was 18 months. They became mobile and their consuming life task was to discover and explore. A toddler can pick up a leaf and be consumed with wonder for this amazing artifact of nature. And vicariously I am caught anew in the wonder and see the leaf through eyes of amazement.

What did I lose when I became an adult? I lost a modicum of wonder. I stopped seeing the leaf as wonder, and saw it as duty, in raking up my yard. I realized that things don't always turn out the way I think they should. I have suffered enough grief and loss to know that there is pain in the world, and that I am not exempt. The older I get the more I am tempted to make wonder irrelevant in my life. Wonder takes time and the world isn't that shining jewel I think I remember as a child. I am sorely tempted to put cynicism in its place, and in fact, many times I have.

Jesus said that if I want to get in to the kingdom, that I need to become like a child. I need to reconnect with that sense of wonder. If I can't recover wonder, then how am I going to deal with the life after this where wonder may be my primary task. 

If I let wonder atrophy then I may enter the next form of my existence crippled and completely unprepared for what awaits me.

Indication of favor

I grew up being told that the reason that we are so wealthy as a nation is because of God's blessings on us and if our culture moves away from what Evangelical Christianity declares is what God favors, that we will lose God's blessing and it will be evident by the loss of our prosperity.

Following that logic, does that mean that those poor people in Darfur really "sinned" against God and acted in such ungodly ways that God not only took away their prosperity, but he took their food away as well?

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31, there is no indication that the rich man's wealth resulted from God's favor. There was displeasure from Father Abraham that the rich man was so unaware of the needs around him. 

No one got hurt

The news anchor talked about a tense episode that ended without incident. She concluded her segment with the sentence "and you will be happy to know that no one got hurt".

Really? Is that what we want? I'm pretty sure that if the news only showed happy stories, few would watch. Why do we slow down for accidents? I think we are looking for that which we don't want to see.

Oh the paradox of our humanity.

Sobriety and snow

Our daughter got her permit on her birthday, and was itching to drive. We went out on Saturday. She drove a couple parking lots and was doing well enough for me to consider her driving a fairly untraveled road. She was doing pretty well. At one point she turned right on a side road and didn't compensate the steering enough and we found ourselves in on-coming traffic.

I pulled on the wheel to move her over into her lane. Being new to driving she put her foot down on the thing she could feel which was the gas pedal. The car accelerated and we landed in deep snow. Snow dust blasted across the windshield. We were good and stuck and it took some friendly neighbors to help free us.

The deep snow kept us from running into a pole or a fence. It was a valuable lesson learned at a relatively low cost. Not all life's lessons come so cheap. My daughter's itch has been modified by a greater sense of sobriety.

As I see it, part of the maturing process is an increase in sober thinking. Sobriety does not have to rob joy from life, but it can temper it. My daughter increased her driving skills because of her chance encounter with an on-coming truck and a snow bank. I believe balancing enthusiasm with sobriety puts us on the path to competence and wisdom.

Bailing out the car industry

Much has been made about the "Big 3" auto makers and how they may not be able to remain in business. What does that do to our country if they go down?

A friend of mine had an idea. (Thanks Steve T.) He thought that a bail-out of the car companies should progress as follows. Every family in the United States could be given $20,000 of credit to be used to purchase a new car. They could purchase the car from any company they wanted to. Money would flow through the economy, car companies could open production lines again which would be good for the employment numbers. It would become apparent which cars are most desired and emissions would be cleaner, which would be a move toward a "greener" America.

The market that would suffer under this plan may be the used car market, "why buy used when buying new will do"? 

One major difference between the auto manufacturers and the used car businesses is that if they were to go to Washington to ask for bail-out money themselves, they would not be flying in on their own corporate jets.

In debt

(This is a post that I wrote a month ago. I thought I posted it, but realized today that I hadn't. In reading through the verbiage, I think it still has relevance today.)

A student of mine had to leave school because their spouse was laid off and this person had to go and get a job. The student makes the sacrifice. Day after day that story is repeated with peoples' lives getting torn apart and people have to make sacrifices to survive. In the month of January 2009 news sources report that 552,000 jobs have been lost. How the little people suffer when at the top, greed is not restrained.

And then I read of companies carrying on like there is no pain in our country. Wells Fargo is the latest to pull back plans from a junket in Las Vegas because of media exposure. Not because they feel any responsibility for the billions the government has given them to bail their sorry butts off! Nope. They pull back because of the negative publicity it generated.

I am angry! How dare they? Our government is saddling us with mountains of debt with or without our permission,  to keep these banks solvent. And when money is thrown at the banks from the tax payers in peril of losing their own jobs, to mitigate the crisis, they act like complete ingrates. They may may be aware of their massive monetary debt, but appear to be completely ignoring a massive debt of gratitude.

Hope for the hopeless

It was announced that the California Prison system has to be reduced by 55,000 within three years. This means that some inmates will be released because the state can no longer afford to incarcerate some of the prison population. What a great time to be an inmate!

Of course it isn't all rosy. Getting out of jail means they will have to find a job. With jobs hard to find and a prison record on their application, that begins to look like a recipe for recidivism, but will the prison take them back? Maybe they will take them back and release the next in line and give them a shot at a work-free world. 

It gives a new meaning to the revolving door of prison.