Purple agony

On this, the threshold of another gloomy Sunday, I can't help but share these Q&A's I got from my brother, another long let down Viking fan...

Brett and the grass:  Old friends



Q. What do you call 47 millionaires around a TV watching the Super Bowl?

A. The Minnesota Vikings

Q. What do the Vikings and Billy Graham have in common?
A. They both can make 70,000 people stand up and yell "Jesus Christ".


Q. How do you keep a Minnesota Viking out of your yard?
A. Put up a goal post.

Q. What do you call a Minnesota Viking with a Super Bowl ring?
A. An Imposter.


Q. What's the difference between the Minnesota Viking and a dollar bill?
A. You can still get four quarters out of a dollar bill.


Q. How many Minnesota Vikings does it take to win a Super Bowl?
A. Nobody Knows

Q. What do the Vikings and possums have in common?
A. Both play dead at home and get killed on the road!

And in case you're thinking of heading to Minneapolis to attend a game, The Minnesota Highway Patrol is cracking down on speeders heading into the downtown area.  For the first offense, they give you 2 Vikings tickets. If you get stopped a second time, they make you use them.

TSA: Just ordinary folks--gone horribly awry

I remember as a kid the Vesuvius-like joy that filled my soul when Dad said we had to go pick up someone from the airport.  The wide-open terminals, the cool little shops (to include the arcade), and airplanes!  What was not to like for a little kid?  I didn't even have to be the one flying.  Airports were great places to be.

Not any more.

In fact, it took us two days to drive to Wisconsin.  You could have handed me five round-trip tickets from my front door to my mom's home and I still would have taken the two-day drive and night in a hotel to get here.

First, I can leave when I want.  I don't have to cater to whenever I can get the tickets.

Second, we have a 'burb full of goodies to snack upon when we travel.  Good eats and sweet fellowship with the family.

Third, my woman and I read to one another while driving.  Not much better way to pass the miles than to read with your bride.  The teen hibernated.  The girls watched movies.

Fourth, and the impetus to this micro-venting, I don't have to go to the airport.

What has become of our airports?  While I never traveled in Eastern Europe in the days of the Iron Curtain, I imagine that getting through the Brandenburg Gate back in the day proved far easier than getting from the front door of any big-city airport in America to the departure gate in 2010.

The fact that my government sees all of its citizens as suspect grieves my heart the most.  While I can seldom bear Ann Coulter's screaming-meemie approach to political observation and discourse anymore, she sums the problem up nicely in a recent article.  In a nut shell, howz-about we target those most likely to target us?  Not the nuns.  Not five year old children.  Not the WWII vets trying to visit their great-grandchildren.  Considering every major atrocity committed against the US in the last three decades has been committed by someone of a conservative Islamic persuasion with a heritage that usually springs from a locale well east of the Mason-Dixon, what say we scrutinize folks like that?

That would require a fundamental shift from the top down not likely to happen in the next two years.  Janet Napolitano has studied internal national security from the likes of old Heinie Himmler and Joe Stalin.  Nope.  She's set and President Obama doesn't appear to be reigning her in.


An American Travesty


So what happens when the order comes down to the TSA agents that they MUST do a nude scan or full-body grope of Sister Mary Catherine before she can board her plane?  Have any balked?  Have any of them quit their job in an economy where jobs are scarce because they could not carry out such heavy-handed tactics against friends and neighbors?

Personally, and like many others, I believe what the TSA is doing to American citizens is criminal, a shaking down of individuals who have provided no impetus to the government for this unreasonable search and sometimes "seizure."  At this point, I come to understand how ordinary men and women could lead other human beings into gas chambers.  Really, it's not that extraordinary a leap.  When national leadership tells you that it's for the good of the nation, that the safety of the country depends upon what you are doing, a sense of civic duty rises up and you answer the call.

Until you take a hard look at what you are really doing.  Unfortunately, I have heard no stories of TSA Agents quitting over what they've been tasked to do.  My heart grows heavy every time I see a picture of the TSA groping folks that ought never be groped, body-scanned or metal detected. 

When will this all end?  I don't know.  Our government of the people is doing this to us.  We have let it tether itself around our freedoms.  It's up to us to say, "No more."

Until then, I'm steering clear of airports, getting out on the wide-open road, and praying they don't institute highway checkpoints between states.

Chipped plates

On a cool afternoon this fall, I puttered away on the computer in our den, and my wife sat on the futon editing a presentation she would be giving to the women in our church.  Chatting and writing, we could hear the typical noises of a house with children and thought nothing of it.

Soon my bride arose and left the room for a moment.  When she returned, she said, "Come see."

Conspirators

I took her hand as she led me to the kitchen.  There, stacked neatly on the counter, sat the clean dishes from the dishwasher.  I recalled hearing the dishes being clanked about but thought my teenage son had taken to the unloading.  I was wrong.  My six-year old daughter conspired with her eight-year old sister to surprise the folks.  They can put away most of the Tupperware, silverware, and plastic glasses themselves.  The plates' home they cannot reach.  And so the neat collection of saucers and bowls betrayed their act of love.

I gathered my eight-year old, Emma, into my arms and squished the stuffing out of her.  "Thank you, Sweetheart, for unloading the dishwasher."  In a glorious confession, Emma declared, "It was Kara's idea," and went on to explain how the plan unfolded.  Kara the six-year old stood listening in the hallway with her perennial smile.  I squished her, too, which isn't hard considering her petite stature.

Lifting the plates into their cupboard home, I noted chips on a quarter of them (none of them new).  Should you have the opportunity to dine with us, you'll not find china before you, and be careful because you might nick yourself on the edge of your dish.  That's just the way it is.  Nicked dishes abide within the residences of families. 

Sometimes things get chipped through carelessness.  Sometimes they get broken through disobedience.  From time to time, they get chipped because in learning to do a task, a child lacks the strength and grace to accomplish the task that their seasoned sibling can pull off without a thought.  The broken dishes are discarded and the sins forgiven.  The chipped plates remain as a testimony to the growth and maturity that comes as part of being in a family.

And sometimes, when eight-year olds and six-year olds show a character beyond their years, everything happens as it should, and two little girls stand beaming at what their hands have wrought.

I am not knowing

A friend mentioned to me this morning his distress over the death of civil discourse in our country.  People can no longer discuss the merit of an idea, the conduct of a person, or any other topic whatsoever without hostilities breaking out. 

What has happened that two individuals can no longer construct and assess arguments on a particular topic without volcanic emotion?  Might I suggest that this should come as no surprise in a post-modern and now a post-Christian era?  For example, I read a little blurb earlier in the week. In it, the author tried to argue against those who used truth as a weapon and indicted those who failed to embrace or comprehend the simplest truths.  Then he regurgitated this hairball:

"...you cannot possibly know if any absolute truths exist, because we simply cannot be absolutely certain. Yes, I firmly believe this postulate that we can never know for certain anything."

If I cannot know that absolute truth exists, why pursue it?  If I did pursue it and found it, how would I know that it was indeed absolute truth?  This recent phenomenon, the idea that there is no truth or that absolute truth cannot be known, puts man in the position of beast.  If I can know nothing for certain, as this teen and many lettered university professors assert, then why should I not eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow I die (Isaiah 22:13, 1 Corinthians 15:32)?  And if I can know nothing for certain, why should you and I bandy arguments about?  What a waste of breath and time!

This know-nothing attitude has murdered logic and rhetoric.  If you don't like my position, you're stupid!  What a moron.  Oh, yeah, you're one of them born-agains.  If people had a modicum of education, they would understand why evolution is brilliant and global warming a fact.  Um, excuse me, do you have any support for anything you are saying, or will you merely assault my character and my identity?

I wish this were merely true outside the church, but such no-nothingness has infected the Body of Christ as well.  Listen to the author's next statement:

"This is the beauty of life, where faith has to step in, lead us, and strengthen us when we are faint of heart."

Francis Schaeffer referred to this as an upper-story leap of faith.  If we can't know anything certain about our current plane of existence, we're going to jump into the realm of illogic and unreason and hope something will be there to encourage my soul.  As the Church has jettisoned the word of God, it has abandoned the only source of objective truth it had.  Today faith and religion is true as long as it is true for you. 

On the contrary, biblical faith is a foundational and fundamental trust in a God who has proven himself over and over to his creatures.  Biblical faith is the child who will leap from the side of the pool into daddy's arms because a) the child knows his father, b) the child has seen his daddy catch him and take care of him many times before, and c) the child applies those facts forward by trusting his daddy to catch him when he leaps.  It's not an irrational leap into the abyss but an absolute trust in the One who is there.

How important is knowing things certainly?  Paul said, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Cor. 15:17)  Whoa.  He anchors our hope as Christians in the FACT that Jesus has been raised.  He says that very thing two verses later, "But in fact Christ has been raised..." (1 Cor. 15:20).

So serious were the apostles about this that John wrote at the end of the first century, "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life" (1 John 5:13).  God himself emphasized evidence throughout Ezekiel where over and over again the fulfillment of prophecy would show Israel and others that he is who he said he is.  "Then you shall know that I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord" (Ezek. 37:14).  Jesus described eternal life as knowing God the Father and God the Son (John 17:3).

How, though, can I be certain about anything in this world?  If I begin with myself, I cannot be certain of anything for how would I know if my faculties were revealing things to me as they truly are?  Perhaps our world is nothing more than a snow globe in the mind of an autistic child as depicted on television's St. Elsewhere.  The only way we can be certain is if someone with an objective perspective conveys to us what reality is.  And someone has.  That someone in fact created the cosmos and each of us as individual masterpieces. 

That Someone is God.

His revealed word, the Bible, provides man with his only sure reference in the cosmos.  While the grass will wither, the flowers will fade, and the North Star may supernova, God's word will remain forever (Isaiah 40:8).  It's no wonder the psalmist declared that God's revealed truth was a lamp to his feet and a light to his path (Psalm 119:105).

The blurber concludes:

This is the journey of life; searching for truth, finding the path to our chosen truth, and watching in prayer as the path unfold before our eyes...We pray that we have chosen to follow the right truth and hope that we haven’t wasted our short life on meaningless treks.

There it is, the maxim of the 21st century.  "Whatever is true for you."  Such a starting point will continue to lead to deteriorating discourse because we begin from two different planets, one anchored in created reality and revealed truth and the other knotted in the wastelands of sin and self.  Pilate shrugged his shoulders asking "What is truth?" and then proceeded to walk away from Truth incarnate and have him crucified.

Guest help: What's love got to do with it?

In days of yore when flying was my vocation, we would have pilots fly with us from other organizations.  We called them "guest help."  This noon I read a musing that I thought would be worthy of your time.  I may be biased as the author is my son.  Nonetheless, some incisive observations on love and relationship from one married less than a year.

"What's that Love thing again?"
by Drew Pond

If love is butterflies, goosh, giggles, and smiles….if love is holding hands while walking through daisies….if love is dancing in the rain…if love is eros, fire, and heat…if love is a hidden kiss….then love is garbage.

Work recently granted me the opportunity to instruct my fellow employees in the ways of love.  I occupied the only seat for a married person at the round table of conversation.  I do not remember how the conversation was spawned, but one of my esteemed coworkers made the observation that, in a marriage, you do not always love your spouse.  There are times when you even hate them, and that is ok.  The important thing is that you hold the knowledge that you will be there at the end of the day.   This individual labeled marriage as a lifelong exercise in turmoil.

Recently married, I hated what I heard.  I realize now that the people, including many professing Christians, have no concept of true love.  So often our definition of love and our attitude towards it varies with our moods.  I will love my wife just so long as I am in a good mood and we always agree.  That sounds more like a friendship between five-year olds.  “You made me mad, so I’m gonna take my ball and go home.  You’re not my friend anymore!!”  “We yell, bicker, and call names, but it is ok.  At the end of the day we will still be in the same house.”   How is that for quality of life?

I countered the misguided meanderings of the ignorant with the Biblical perspective.  Many of you, I am sure, are familiar with Ephesians 5:25 “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it,” as well as verse 22 of the same chapter, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”  I refuse to get too involved in all the in's and out's of these verses now.  Many people have written many books to that end.  I simply want to highlight what love is.  In both of these verses an illustration is given commanding a practice we all tend to do very naturally.  (Please sense the sarcasm in that last phrase.)

SACRIFICE.  Yeah, I know that a complete sentence requires a subject and a verb, but try to lose yourself in the dramatic effect of the capital letters.  Sacrifice and servitude are concepts utterly foreign to our humanistic, hedonistic society.  However, these principles exemplify TRUE LOVE, they are the practices that make a marriage last.  A desire to submit, love, and sacrifice comes from sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and separation from sin (the lusts of the flesh).   Familiarity with the ultimate show of deference, Christ in Gethsemane, spurs the one born-again to follow the example of their Savior in exhibition of love.  John 15:12-13 “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”  Not only did Jesus give up his life by death, but he gave up his desire for the cup to pass from him in order to fulfill the will of the Father and provide salvation to all.

If a marriage is to work, if we are to exhibit true love, we must be willing to submit ourselves to the will of the Father, to defer our wants and needs out of love for another, and to sacrifice ourselves for another.  It is possible, it is hard, but it is commanded, and it is amazing.  Woe to the marriage where it is absent or viewed as optional.

Well said, Drew.

(Reprinted without permission with minor editions from his Facebook page)

What to read, what to read...

Flying is a perishable skill.  That's why the Thunderbirds, Blue Angels, Snowbirds, and the like practice, practice, practice.  It looks glamorous, but it is gruelling, exhausting, demanding, meticulous, exhilarating work.  I don't speak first hand, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

So I sit and stare at my keyboard.  It looks as though all the letters have remained in the same place.  That's encouraging.  Plunking out a blog entry a couple of times each week does not compare to the demand of flying fighter aircraft inches from one's wingman at g-loads that would put most folks right to sleep.  No, but it is my hope to not put you to sleep either.

So why did I stop writing?  I didn't.  One day simply heaped upon the next for an extended period of time.  I guess it's the same reason we missed Christmas cards last year.  One morning it was September, the next it was February.  Guess it's a little late to send the cards.  Well, here July blinked into November.  Truly, I hope that November doesn't blink into May.

Many thanks to those of you who lurk across these pages and wondered about the silence of the previous months.  When I began these musings three years ago this January, my intent was to look at the world around me through the lens of God's word, the only lens that would provide clarity to the situations of life.  I did not mean for there to be such a distance between ponderings.  Thanks to those who spurred me back to the keyboard.

In the event that these pages stagnate again--no promises--let me recommend a book to you.  I'd never read anything by Randy Alcorn, he's written both fiction and non, but his title, "If God is Good:  Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil," deserved a look.  With the drivel written in the past about why bad things happen to good people, I hungered for a book with a rock-solid biblical foundation that addressed the topics of the title.

I was not disappointed.  Clearing 500 pages, it's a daunting book, but it needed to be so.  Alcorn doesn't shy away from hard questions.  He doesn't sweep them behind the bushes.  Nor does he seek answers from sources that shift like San Andreas' fault.  No, he plumbs and scours the depths of God's word to find sure answers to the essential questions of our existence.

This is not a book that merely wades into dark swamps never to return.  On the contrary, in examining these places, Alcorn had to examine the character and nature of God.  Few books I have read in my life so exalt God outside the Bible as this one does, and it does so by highlighting God's revelation about himself in the Bible.

I mentioned the size of the book.  Yep, it's a big'n.  That said, those 500-pages are broken down into 45 chapters comprising 11 sections.  Each chapter is further broken down in five to ten bite-sized sections.  The way he has broken this book down makes it a very manageable read; don't let its size deter you.

On top of all of this, it's not a pie-in-the-sky, unapplied book.  The book is replete with stories of those who have been through and are currently within the crucible of suffering and tragedy.  Through it all, the faithfulness and the sovereignty and the goodness of God shine like stars in a moonless sky.

If you have nothing to read, let me steer you toward this book for many reasons (by the way, I do not know Mr. Alcorn, nor do any proceeds come back to me).  If you have plenty to read, let me encourage you to move this into the top three of your pile.  It is that good.

And stop back by here.  I hope to not be a stranger to my own blog.  I might even get my Christmas cards out this year.