Tunnel Vision!

These are not stars!

If you looked through a soda straw 8 foot long, this is the tiny part of the sky you could see, and these are galaxies there; about 10,000 of them.

Tunnel vision, like looking through a soda straw  ... looking at such a tiny part of what is.  You could spend a lifetime focused on this 1/1000000000000th of the available view.

We do that.  It's a semi-survival mechanism.  We can't keep it all in view all the time.

In a small town where we lived, folk's lives were often filled with local concerns.  Some perhaps had a larger view, but the time spent talking about the traffic accident involving a garbage truck and a college employee wasn't as profitably spent as it might have been.  There are more important things than that about which one might be concerned.

For natural reasons we focus on our own lives, and rather narrowly.  What we have and what we want to have occupy most of our time.  Our narrow view excludes most of what is available to see and know and experience.

Mayan tunnel window at
Altun Ha ruins.

Tunnel Vision and the Narrow View: can it be set aside?

Our humanity gives us opportunity to see more than just our own wants, of course.  Do we?  Do we care about those outside of our own circle?  Would we sacrifice a bit for someone we didn't know?  Would we take action for the disenfranchised, the castoffs, the poor?

Mayan window is a t-shaped tunnel ...  not much of a view;
perhaps a bit like ours as we focus on just ourselves?

Can we choose?  Can we move into caring broadly and deeply?  It is a stunning life changer, we're told.  There is nothing that compares to love given without expecting anything in return.  And in being loved.  Interestingly, such a choice changes everything, up to and including our understanding of God himself.



Religion can focus us narrowly on small issues, just one small aspect of something which is immeasurably larger and grander than the greatest expanse of space.  Walking the ridge above the Grand Canyon or standing beside Victoria Falls can be breath-taking, but just skirting the presence of the God Who Is can be ... reconstructive!  All good.  I want to see it all.

Teach the children well ...

Children should obey. ... but is there more?  More than we teach by rules and penalties?

Do this!  Don't do that!  You'll get in trouble, you'll get grounded, you'll lose your privileges  . . .

and later,

Do this!  Don't do that!  They'll put you in jail, you'll lose your job, your property . . .

Do, or . . .  It's fear-based, of course.  If there's a loophole or a chance of escape, the threatened penalty is no longer a deterrent.  Street gangs, Wall Street gangs, a gang of thieves or a gang of congressmen and their lobbyists, if they can get away with it, they'll likely do as they please.  When the standard is a rule (law), it can dull and weaken.

The way of rules is lamented among all civilizations, generation after generation.  Rules reach for that which they cannot embody; right thinking and a good conscience.  Those who walk the path of rules fall short of even the least laudable of goals.

Children learn most by our example.
The exasperated father spanks his complaining child.  ...
The fearful mother shakes her rambunctious toddler.  ...
The teen's exhausted parent shouts down the offered answer.  ...   What did they teach?

Conflict and violence, the power play, the heavy hand ... fear!  And escalation in response to resistance.

But our great hope is to raise up our children to be men and women of courage and strength, nobility and clarity, with hearts for truth and compassion, justice and mercy.  None of those qualities are engendered by the 'rules and punishments' way, are they.

What can we do? 

He's a gracious father, uncle, and grandfather.
I watched as he worked through difficult
issues with his family, and was instructed
 by his calm and thoughtful manner.
It's the far side of the world in a culture where
family is perhaps more important than is
common in western culture.

Encourage them every day.  Tell them in practical ways that you love them unconditionally. Notice everything they do well, from table manners to helping to homework, and speak appreciatively.  Compliment them for their choices that reflect good character.

When they misbehave, try grieving instead of getting angry.  Or anything instead of anger.  Anything.

When they complain at the top of their lungs that, "You said 'no' just because you don't want me to have any fun," try responding tenderly to their frustration, and perhaps walk them through the decision they've asked you to make.  Let them inquire, listen honestly to their thoughts about this and that.  It may or may not change your decision, but it won't teach them fear.  It won't leave them unloved and alone.

A conflict with your child is not for the moment only.  How you respond will determine if there are more head-on conflicts in the future or fewer.

There's a great gulf between discipline and punishment, isn't there.  One shapes character, the other may cripple it, especially if you're angry.  Never conclude an occasion of reproof without genuine love and understanding between you.  In the years to come, they'll remember little of what you said compared to their memories of how you loved them. 

Sheep or Goat? Is that fair?

He wasn't talking about sheep and goats, you know.  He was just using the shepherd's illustration because it would be familiar.  Everybody had the visual to go with it; the end of a dusty day, a crowd of tired animals, and the shepherd sorting them out for their pens.

I was hungry and you fed me . . .

No religion here; just illustration. Individual by individual, some to the right, some to the left, and it's not about membership. He explains that it's about how we lived; was it for ourselves alone, or did we include others. Maybe it's whether we cared or not, too.

He himself was well-off and comfortable, comparatively speaking, when he set it all aside and came to us. All of us were the needy ones. He could have just sent everybody money, I suppose, but he gave himself. We needed something, a different heart maybe, and he made a way for us. He gave everything, until he had nothing left.

About the giving thing; I doubt he means the $20 here or there to make a sad feeling go away. He probably has a larger context in mind; caring deeply, to the point where we'll forgo some comfort, maybe.

Pretty straightforward, isn't it. We care; we cover the cost, we do what it takes to make a difference. When we do those things, we do it to him, he says. Or, we don't.

So if we learn, and we share his heart, that suggests perhaps we've become a bit like him. And if we didn't learn and we didn't live it out, it's because we didn't know his heart. Or him. At least that's what it sounds like. Like we never knew him at all.

It's maybe too familiar; we've heard it so many times, but didn't know what to do with it. Perhaps now?

... and he will sort the people out, much as a shepherd sorts out sheep and goats, putting sheep to his right and goats to his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Welcome, you who are blessed by my Father! Take your place in this kingdom. It’s been ready for you since the world’s foundation. And here’s why-

You saw me when I was hungry; you stopped and fed me,
You saw that I was thirsty and you gave me a drink,
You saw that I was homeless and you gave me a room,
You saw I was shivering and you gave me clothes,
You saw when I was sick and you stopped to visit,
You saw me in prison; you made time and came to me.’

They'll exclaim wonderingly, ‘But sir, what are you saying? When did we ever see you hungry and feed you, thirsty and give you a drink? And when did we ever see you sick or in prison and come to you?’ Then the King will answer, ‘I'll tell you; when you did these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me - you did it to me. You didn't pass me by.’

Then he will turn to the ones on his left and say, ‘Get out, cursed ones! Your place is with those rebels who tore themselves away from my father's house. And why? Because -

You saw me hungry and turned away; you gave me no meal,
You saw when I was thirsty and turned away; you gave me no drink,
You saw that I was homeless and passed me by; you gave me no bed,
You saw me shivering and went on to your own affairs; you gave me no clothes,
You saw me when I was sick and in prison, and you were busy; you never visited.’

Then those on the left will say, ‘But sir! When did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or homeless or shivering or sick or in prison and not help?’

He will answer them, ‘I'm telling the truth; when you failed to do those things for someone like that, that was me - you failed to do it for me. You turned away.’"

Don't look at me; I'm not the one that said all that.  He says kingdom, but does that mean heaven?  Or something in this life?  Or what?  Is the kingdom he referred to here and now and inside us?  He had a lot more to say than just this, of course, but I get the idea that we're supposed to be changed, somehow, and the change will redefine the way we live. And perhaps the reason as well.

S.E.P. - Someone Elese's Problem

Someone Else's Problem or SEP is a mental process where individuals or populations choose to dissociate themselves from an issue that may be in critical need of attention.

Not my problem, man!

We're besieged by pictures of children in need, famine, drought, and poverty. The only sane response is to push it all aside. If you don't, you'll be overwhelmed by the needs of others. You'll be sad, depressed, and helpless. NOT!

It's not hard to connect with organizations that really help. World Vision is at the top of the list of dozens of worthy programs. The hard task is choosing to actually care, perhaps.

Marilyn with a couple of our scholars ...

If you go and see for yourself, you'll probably be undone. My wife was pretty much shattered when I took her to meet my friends in Africa. It took her about a year to recover enough to see things clearly. Now, when we get a call or a text from friends in Africa, it's a pleasure. Helping out, keeping kids in school, helping a family through difficult times, stuff like that is a real joy.

They own their family home now.

My daughter helped a family buy their house. She used her tax refund to make up the difference they needed; both she and they are tickled by the event. When I last visited them, they were so proud of the progress they'd made in the previous year, and they named me as godfather for their new baby! Dad's a fisherman, mom raises rabbits, and the kids are all in school, working hard and doing well. They've got pictures of us in their main room, and we have pictures of them on the wall, too.

Making a difference can cost as little as a lunch at Ruby Tuesday's.

My buddy Anderson is six this month; his mom and I were on the phone
just a few minutes ago singing happy birthday together.  He struggles a bit
with reoccurring malaria, but it's controlled for now.

We're connected to efforts in east and west Africa, if you'd like a recommendation for where to start. Lots of friends have chipped in. Tuition and such for more than a hundred children now, salary for three teachers, assistance for a church group serving community orphans, building a community center/preschool, and several family projects. If you want to go and see for yourself, I'll introduce you. It's more fun than any vacation you've ever had.

Who's left behind?

Change doesn't happen at a uniform pace.   

Things change, and it's hard to keep up.  A sudden blip in this field or that can spill down into unexpected change.  (Data mining and the NSA come to mind.)

Laggards when it comes to change,
governments and churches are
often the last to know and adapt.

Governments historically lag far behind key change points.  Laws and law makers scramble to understand.  Privacy disappeared before the overseers could rein in the abusers with their advanced capabilities.  Microsoft and Twitter ramp up protections against NSA hacking.  The SEC is scrambling to find out how the world economy was taken to the brink by 'bankers'.

As change rushes by, teachers scramble to understand the culture they serve.  Married couples are now less than half of our households, businesses scramble to catch up with the new process models. Amazon swept up a huge constituency before mainstream retailers caught on. No contest; yet.  Local retailers scramble to join the broad-based competition for customers. Now you can shop online at a dozen car dealerships and have them compete against each other for pricing.

Information proliferation and social change have reshaped the meaning of community and relationship.  High school students live in a world their parents don't understand.

'Google time' is what they call those interludes when you're thinking your way through from this task to that.  Open source, open forum, open information on any subject is at our fingertips.  Wikipedia outstripped Britannica long ago.

The traditional church sings old hymns and follows an order of service unchanged in half a century.  Modernization attempts, putting songs up on a screen and tweeting members, seem lame to the under 40 folks.

Hillsong United

... a rather off-the-wall leap into
non-traditional church.

So what are they, the emerging culture, doing with their faith and time?  A group of young mothers gather to encourage each other through the furor of raising children today.  They talk about what works, what they're aiming for in their children's lives.  And they pray fervently for grace and wisdom.  It's real for them.

Hillsong explodes; “Our singular, all-consuming passion is to build God's Church and Kingdom on the earth, and see everyday people released into their purpose and calling."

A twenty-something girl invites a couple of guys from work to go to her non-standard but semi-mainline church; green-o-maximo guys.  They had a ball; it wasn't a typical service; more of a 'meet God and see what he has to say' sort of occasion.  They were bubbling with enthusiasm as they got introduced around, and they left encouraged.

In eastern Africa with skipped-step changes, folks I know live in handmade huts of stone and clay with straw roofing.  They have cell phones.  And MPESA accounts to pay with.  They've skipped the intervening steps of telephone lines and poles, of bank cards, and they chat with friends ... anywhere in the world.

Fellowship in Kenya, it's the real thing.

In the developing world, church is real for many families and their young people; not a club or a meeting or a box being checked as it has become for much of the developed world.  If it doesn't make a difference, they don't have time or energy to waste pretending.  They work together and help each other.

Western Africa in the mountains, a Catholic
youth group helps the community rebuild
their crop areas.

On an African mountainside, I met a group of young folks from the local church.  They were renovating the garden areas for a small community.  They wanted to make a difference.

As I drove up to a friends home in a remote village in western Africa, in the shade under the house-on-stilts, two ladies sat and read the bible together and prayed for their children.  Give us today, bread, and deliver us from the evil we see every day.  It's real for them.  Is it real for us?  Tell the truth.

Time for us to change?  We change continually, or what we do becomes perhaps less relevant, less useful, or just ... less.

Skip a step or two?  Dump the process?  Start over from scratch?  Got a vision?
Leap out there, froggie!

The Adult Mind - Part III: The Vampire

The Vampire Mind

 - Blood-sucking as a lifestyle ...

How much blood can you suck out of an entire country?

University of Missouri economic historian and former Wall Street economist Michael Hudson explains, his job on Wall Street was to be the balance and payments economist for Chase Manhattan bank in the 1960s. His first job there was to calculate how much debt third world countries could pay, and the answer was, "‘Well, how much do they earn?’ And whatever they earned, that’s what they could afford to pay in interest. And our objective was to take the entire earnings of a third world country and say ‘Ideally, that would be all paid as interest to us.’”

In terms of magnitude of effect and the raw number of people harmed, finance leads the battle force.  Federal sanctions are bought by wealthy influencers for marketplace behavior that spills over onto the world.  The result?  The widening gap between rich and poor, the disappearance of a middle class, the decline of income for the majority ... and thousands die in the third world as a direct and attributable result of specific decisions made on Wall Street by less than 50 executives and in Washington by a few dozen more.

Question: how could a human being be so dull about their own choice to take from others?  In Part II, we saw a stage in preadolescence where the mind sees nothing but its own needs, feelings, desires, ....  Is that where these have stalled?  Arrested development, willing to take the food out of the hands of millions so they can themselves be rich and comfortable far beyond any reasonable measure?  Incredible.

The troubling corollary, that same self-centeredness is in us all.  Each of us has the opportunity early on to love ourselves alone or to love others as well.  If what we do is the measure of our success, it's perhaps clear to us and others if we understand at least that much.  Is there more?

Money problems:  In this morning's commercials, AIG says they've paid back everything they took from the American people.  And Merry Christmas.  Not true, of course. 

• We've recouped a portion of the bail-out costs, but the multi-trillion dollar loss in the U.S. marketplace came out of our collective savings.  The break-even timeline of six years to recover the losses only points out that we've lost six years of returns on investment.  
• The impact on the developing world was larger.  Those without savings to lose lost the ability to participate in the marketplace.  Wildly fluctuating prices moved wealth to the monied players while the working class lost ground, options, access, and ability to feed their families.

Does knowing such things require a different behavior from us?

The Adult Mind - Part I
The Adult Mind - Part II
The Adult Mind - Part IV