I think we passed our turnoff ...

It's disappointing to realize the highway you wanted is a hundred miles back.  Continuing along that nice road is easy, but without benefit.

Welcome to Christendom.  It's huge, expensive, and off course.

Decades ago, a teacher described the lifecycle of such things.  From a legitimate beginning, a pure concept with tremendous power and purpose, often the history reads like this:

'Paintbrush Warrior' by Mark Hanson, 2009

• Man with a vision - he makes a wonderful, purposeful impact that changes things for the better
• Men with a mission - those among the hearers who rise up to formalize the changes, but no vision
• Mankind with a monument - the institutionalized legacy, the speeches and rules and micro-details, but no more changes and no vision

Christendom's curse began in the fourth century with the state establishment of institutionalized religion.  Church became government and big business.  Church politicians played for power, and visionless spokesmen fought furiously over inconsequential details.  And heretics were tortured and killed.  Church became something you attend instead of something you are, and worship became something you watch instead of something you give.  Along the timeline, serious attempts to get back on the highway risked being swallowed up by the same sequence.  

What's obscured in it all?
The short answer; the Author and the vision's purpose.

There was more than one man carrying the vision, of course.  John the Baptist was early on the road, later Paul and Peter, John the Apostle, and more.  None were looking for followers.  They were encouraging folks to connect with the Author of the vision for themselves.

Before them, Elijah, Isaiah ... there's a long list of folks who were pointing the way to the vision's source.  They found themselves struggling against stagnant institutional thinking, much like today, I suppose.  Not every religious leader stayed in that manmade box, but enough did and do to make matters difficult.  Their constituents live under the burden of it, yet the vision lives on despite the mess in the 'upper ranks'.

Today, there are still such folks who encourage us, not to join and be members, but to connect with the vision's Author for ourselves.  Perhaps these are the "apostles and prophets," we're told about.

The emerging church, the one that has turned to pursue the Author, is growing at an extraordinary pace.  In Africa particularly, it's encouraging.

Our hope in it all is not for institutional growth, but for a new awareness and a broad sweep across the nations of those who truly want to know the Author for themselves.  It's happening now, it seems, mostly a divergence from the mainstream.  Many have found the highway.  The high way.

We live in interesting times.

Economic Solutions: Exile?

Perhaps every corrupt politico and business exec should be permanently exiled to the world's poorest country... with just the clothes on their back.

Those who took multimillion dollar bonuses for crashing the world marketplace, those who defrauded investors, those who lied when they created worthless mortgage instruments, and those who let big business buy the laws they wanted ...

There are so many fair-minded folks in the world, willing to work hard and earn their way.  Then there the greedy ones who have everything and want more even if it is at the expense of another, or a million others.

I've been to some of the world's poorest countries.  Most of the folks I met were gracious and hospitable.  It wouldn't be fair to send them our maggots, I suppose.  They deserve better than to have a gaggle of JP Morgan players in their midst even if it would be humorous.  I have to admit, though, I'd love to see Deeb Salem and a flock of Goldman Sachs execs down at the river doing their laundry.

Napoleon was exiled.  Twice.  
He'd unified Europe, brought an end to feudalism, established legal equality, and religious toleration.  He made an attempt at ending slavery.  He gave Europe the Napoleonic Code which forbade privileges based on birth, allowed freedom of religion, and specified that government jobs should go to the most qualified.  The code influenced the world thereafter.

Despite such auspicious beginnings, things didn't work out well for Napoleon.  Too many power players, too much closeted wealth, and stunning avarice.  Perhaps we exiled the wrong leader.

Today's empire builders wage economic warfare, extracting wealth from the developing world with impunity, manipulating the entire world's marketplace for their betting table.  Here's hoping their Waterloo doesn't take the rest of us down.

The Path to Irrelevance

"He's in the third year of the best four years of his life," the bullied victim observed, "on the path to being irrelevant." 

He'd been pushed hard up against the wall yet again by a bigger boy in high  school.

An insightful comment.

The high school bully might enjoy his brief playtime before entering the real world.  Soon enough, real life will swallow him. He'll slide into an amoral lifestyle (criminal, business), or he might just suppress it all and waste his years becoming an angry, bitter fellow.

New on the agenda, cyberbullying.

Unless change comes.

Studies show that children who bully tend to be overly aggressive, lacking in a moral compass, and plagued with conflict in relationships. In addition, they tend to associate with bully-backers and others who bully.

School bullying does not just go away once kids finish school.  Instead, it increases the odds of future problems. By their mid-twenties, former bullies have a four times higher rate of criminal behavior than their non-bullying peers. By their mid-thirties, more than half of people who bullied in grades 6 through 9 have at least one criminal conviction.  Bullying behavior often continues into the workplace.  They'll have more failed or distressed relationships, and antisocial behavior disorders.

The bully is twice a killer; first in choosing to harm another, and second in destroying their own soul.

A practised bully struggles with listening objectively and with compromise.  Common inabilities will include loving unselfishly, selfless giving, and letting down the walls.  A difficult life of continual distress.
Unless change comes.


School is a child's other world, away from parental oversight where they can be someone else.  Today, social media is a similar venue. Children who bully there are at risk with significantly higher probability of following a destructive path. Parents, talk openly with your children about bullying.  Catch it early, understand it and deal with it appropriately.



________________________________________________________________________________
For starters, see the PBS article: What to do when your child is a bully
See: Bullying Prevention is Crime Prevention and The Bully's Way Out
See: Bully-proofing your child by Dr. Laura Markham for a first look at insulating your child from emotional harm.
For the studies and statistics, see: School bullying as a predictor of violence later in life: A systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective longitudinal studies, Maria M. Ttofi, David P. Farrington, Friedrich Lösel, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
See: Bullying and Victimization in Elementary Schools: A Comparison of Bullies, Victims, Bully/Victims, and Uninvolved Preadolescents, Developmental Psychology, American Psychological Association 2005, Vol. 41, No. 4, 672– 682

The GAP - Part VII

We've not yet recovered.  Today, more than twenty million previously employed are unemployed or in part-time work as a survival option.  Actual recovery will take decades, it appears.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is doing quite well in the aftermath of the Great Recession.  Salaries and bonuses are good.  Attempts to reign in the 'too big to fail' institutions have stalled; you can ask your congressman why.  Indictments for causing the worldwide economic collapse remain at zero.

From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, "Nonfarm payrolls fell by more than 8.7 million, or 6.3 percent, and the number of unemployed climbed to 14.7 million over the course of the recession, peaking at 10 percent of the nation’s labor force in October 2009. Further, many workers faced extended bouts of unemployment or left the labor force altogether. The ranks of the underemployed (those who want a job but can only find part-time work) and frustrated job seekers (those who become discouraged and give up looking for work) rose to 12 million, a 94 percent increase. In July 2013, four years after the recession is deemed to have ended, labor underutilization remains intractably high: 11.5 million people are unemployed and an additional 10.6 million are underemployed or frustrated."

The GAP between rich and poor continues to grow.  It affects everything from academic performance of children to employment, health, and life expectancy.

While this inequality is now quite clear in the U.S., it is strongly evidenced in countries around the world as well.

The Impact on Education?

The inequality GAP self-perpetuates through many factors but perhaps most troublingly via the impact it has on the quality of available education.

The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor. 

Food Fight!

The world's war today includes food ... among other things related to money.

In places where people go hungry, it's the money makers and power players that channel the food available to the highest bidder. There is no food shortage.

It's not a new tactic.  In the six year 'Potato Famine', a million Irish poor died unnecessarily and another million fled the country because business and government consciously chose against them in their time of need.  There was plenty of food.

Sixty years before, "... Ireland had a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government overrode their protests.^[76] No such export ban happened in the 1840s.^[77]

Throughout the six years of the Potato Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. ... "Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. But that was a 'money crop' and not a 'food crop' and could not be interfered with."^[78]

... Almost 4,000 ships carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during 1847 alone, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. ,,, exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the Famine. ...  peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey... 822,681 imperial gallons of butter ... The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor.^[80]"

Now as the food business continues to pursue the money, for the first time in human history the number of overweight people rivals the number of underweight people, according to a report from the Worldwatch Institute. While the world's underfed population has declined slightly since 1980 to 1.1 billion, the number of overweight people has surged to 1.1 billion.

Both the overweight and the underweight suffer from malnutrition, a deficiency or excess of what is needed for healthy living.

The public health impact is stunning.  More than half of the world's disease burden - measured in "years of healthy life lost"- is attributable to hunger, overeating, and dietary imbalance. "The century with the greatest potential to eliminate malnutrition instead saw it boosted to record levels," according to recent research.

In a world without any food shortage, it's still hard to get a healthy meal for many folks.

In the developed world, folks are barely aware of the differences between processed food and natural, and little emphasis is placed on balance. 

In the developing world, access to the right foods for a balanced diet is perhaps the greatest challenge.

Again, in places where people go hungry, it's the money makers and power players that channel the food available to the greatest return instead of the greatest need.  The same applies at the far end of the availability spectrum where sales are more important than health.  Eating is marketed as recreational and the end product is unhealthy overweight.  The 'healthy eaters' among us and the 'health food stores' are a miniscule minority.

All in all, today's marketplace is orchestrated to sell rather than to serve well. 

Among our family friends in east and west Africa, many of the children are under height for age and under weight for height due to a lack of protein.  It wasn't a problem for the coastal villages until the fish populations were destroyed by illegal commercial fishing.  My fishermen friends tell me they remember catching tuna regularly within a mile or so of the shore.  These days, they go out 10-20 kilometers in their sailing dugouts and often come home with nothing.  Sometimes, they don't come back.

These are just normal, hardworking folks who can pretty much take care of themselves, except they're being robbed by the rich countries illegally fishing in their territorial waters.

In the world of food, there's something missing if the only driver is money, it seems.  I wonder how things might best be adjusted at the personal and national level.

See more of the story here.

The Strangest of Creatures

The Relationship Monster!

There is a strange creature, born in an instant, that grows and evolves forever.  It's genuinely bizarre.


Before the creature exists, the two gametes circle each other briefly, but when they finally touch ... they connect, and birth is almost instantaneous.

From the first moment, the mutual hosts begin to make connections.  They nervously select a potential connection point to try from a list of thousands.  Each success gives them courage to attempt another.  With deliberate choice and time, the connections will become a structural bond, strong beyond imagining, continually forming and reaching for more.

Each connection succeeds or fails.  Some are more important than others.  If too many important ones fail, the creature dies.

That's the way our heart works, and this strange creature ... is the relationship between two; two friends, two strangers, two soldiers at the front, or a pair of high school teens falling in love.  A meaningful relationship begins with a connection or two, perhaps a shared interest or common circumstance.  Being in the same foxhole is a good start for some.

The strength of a relationship grows by choices, values, and actions over time.  The one who labors to understand you and who works with you rather than in competition against you will be the durable friend, the long-term relationship.

The relationship that fails doesn't do so suddenly. Most often, it's many issues of disconnect, different values, priorities, concerns long left unresolved. We talk about having a different heart than they ... or maybe no 'chemistry'.   Perhaps it's my choices rather than our choices along the way.

The workings of relationship are beautifully visible in families.  Husbands - wives - children - extended family, the quality of each relationship will reflect the choices to connect and endure.

The teen transition years are an (almost) humorous look at how relationships evolve.  It's a furiously high-speed change from dependent child to independent adult, and all the connections have to be carefully disassembled and reassembled. Both parent and teen have difficulties to work through.

Why evolve?  Children have decisions made for them. Pre-teens and teens have to make so, so many decisions, but the coach on the sidelines still has a say.  Making the change while preserving the relationship can be difficult for all involved.  Tense times.

A few among many well-worn phrases that come to mind:

• The relationship is more important than the issue (when disagreements happen)
• Don't burn your bridges (when one pulls away)
• Listen a lot (rather than talk louder)
• Understand the goals, and that winning the argument isn't one of them!
• It takes two, and how can two walk together unless they be agreed ...
• Two are better than one for when one falls, the other will pick them up ...

The connections are what binds one to another.  It seems that each connection is important and each failed connection carries a measure of risk.

It's a natural process that just happens but it includes deliberate awareness and choice.  You can hear the details in the narrative provided by children or adults as they describe their time with another.  Things that drew them closer or pushed them apart, connections made or broken.

Now we can perhaps begin to see what 'two becoming one' is about.  Shared goals, shared values, shared priorities, all are established and agreed deliberately, not by chance.  There isn't any chance that any two will have all those things at the beginning.  The connections are established and maintained by deliberate agreement and choice, day after day, issue after issue, walking ever closer together through life.

Every relationship is important.  Every chance to graciously include someone else in your world is worth the price. With family, and especially when it comes to our children, it is perhaps the best opportunity we have for a meaningful life. Among such lofty goals, a husband and wife who love so genuinely as to become one, well, that's perhaps the best of it all.

That's the way it works; hope you like it.