Hope...is what we need.

Random killings.

Wars.

Floods.

Disasters.

I can't help but think about the sayings of Jesus and the book of Revelations. The references to the end-times were always a bit of a mystery to me. Yet Jesus spoke often of the times when we would see more and more signs of His return.

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains. But in those days, following that distress, 'the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.'...No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come. - Mark 13

I spoke with my cousin a few days ago about a sermon she heard her pastor give about Jesus's return...he urged people to keep in mind that "no one knows the hour"...but that someday Jesus would return to judge the world. It could today, tomorrow, a week, or hundreds of years from now...but it will happen when we see signs of trouble in the world. Disasters, floods, people dying, wars, and an increase in these things around the world. My cousin shared that she felt convicted after hearing her pastor's words that life was short and that she needed to make the most of the gifts she had been given to pursue her music career and honor God with the time she had on earth...it made me think about how my decisions and choices in life might be informed by the knowledge that Jesus would return again someday...and that God will judge all that we did, the choices we made, how we lived our lives.

And what does one do in a situation when everything seems to be falling apart in the world?

God has known from the beginning of time all that would happen and all that is to come. He said that someday there would be a 'new heaven and a new earth,' but not before we saw some pretty bad things happen first.

Sound simple? Maybe it is. But he also said the wisdom of God would shame human knowledge and wisdom. His message was so simple that even children could understand it. And yet it is sometimes hard to understand.

I pray that we would come to focus our eyes on Him and that more people would see why we need His hope in a time of uncertainty, why we need a Savior.

"The battle is not between flesh, but in the spiritual realms."

A Man Without a Country

Tribute to Vonnegut.

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"

"Why are so many people getting divorced today? It's because most of us don't have extended families anymore."

-Kurt Vonnegut

A funny thing happened on the way...

to Chicago, aka, Chi-town. Or, notoriously, Chi-tonw (famous for a tattoo given to a man with the wrong spelling who is now suing the artist).

I have to be honest. Chicago has not impressed me the few times I have been here in the past several months. It must be the spoiled, cosmopolitan new-yorker in me, but everything moves slower, the wind is colder, the air is darker, the buildings are not as impressive...I dunno. One and a half days it's been, and I want to go back to the Big Apple already. (Of course, it's only been a little over a day! and there are a few friends I will be seeing - could make all the difference.)

But the numerous things that went wrong on the way didn't help either. Bad weather in Chicago caused numerous flight cancellations and delays. I got to the airport extra early, paid a hefty $50 to get to JFK by cab, only to find that my 8pm flight was now pushed to 11pm. I arrived into O'Hare around 1am and decided to take public transportation to my hotel across town at Midway airport (to save money, of course). Background note: I had, several weeks prior, bought a two-night's stay on Priceline, thinking I might find a good deal, but somehow accidentally clicked on "Midway" airport area as an option and got stuck staying at a hotel totally out of the way and non-refundable/non-transferrable to boot. I take the train from O'Hare to the center of town and find the lines to Midway all closed. I am forced to shell out another $30 for a cab to the airport from downtown. I arrive at the Marriot and they tell me that it's totally booked - I am transferred to another hotel (a bit lower in quality) and collapse after 3am, totally exhausted...

Today was another long day, not too bad, but not too good either. I don't know what it is about the travels, but this has not been smooth sailing by any means. So many little things have gone wrong, that it all seems too much to be mere coincidence. Maybe God is telling me I belong back in New York, or that I need to unlearn my New York sensibilities...

I made a conscious decision to make this trip to Chicago - while ostensibly for work - a spiritual retreat as well. Brought my bible, brought my journal (which I tend to write in highly inconsistently) and decided to be intentional about prayer, meditation and reflection and time with the Lord. I think it started out great on the way from New York to Chicago. Wrote in my journal at the airport, prayed, felt God speaking to me and reminding me of things He had shared long ago. Even before falling asleep last night, I managed to read some verses in Proverbs (sobering) and pray for a while, before drifting off to sleep. It felt intense, it felt like something I needed to do...not sure why.

Anyway, I woke up (not quite refreshed) this morning and went downtown to the conference site, where I had to last minute chair and act as a discussant for a panel. This was or seemed like side stuff - the conference/panel/networking deal is all surreal. I feel like a part of me is there, but a lot of me wonders (as I do whenever I am surrounded in large meetings with a lot vibes exuding self-importance and vanity, where I hardly know the people on a personal level) whether all of this is really pleasing to God...(or is this thought an excuse for looking heavenward so I can avoid concrete realities of everyday life?) In any case, I have been thinking a lot about what God may be teaching me about myself, my relationships and the things happening in my life at this particular season or time. Cliche as it sounds, I want to turn over a new leaf. I feel like now is the time...to recommit my decisions, my life and focus on Him and His purposes. To let go of whatever is hindering me in my walk with Him and to make Christ first.

It's hard though - (and not to be the drama queen) but I feel a little bit like those poor Israelites in the desert, right after leaving Egypt...my Chicago...? my New York? Many years go by before they reach Canaan, the Promised Land. When will I arrive? Who and where are my fellow Israelites? Do I have the heart and mind and faith to receive "the good things He has prepared for those who love Him"?

I want to have the faith, the trust that God will lead - that I would be able to simply follow and obey.

Help me have the faith that can move mountains, God. Help me to believe in your power to do anything when we ask in Your name and call on the name of Jesus.

Help me not to be lukewarm or half-hearted, but fully committed to living out my life in devotion to you.

Help me to be a light and a servant; to make myself less so that you can become more.

I want you to be the center of my life, Lord.

The center.

Maybe that's what I've learned the last few days...How strange and paradoxical it is - but maybe setbacks have a way of moving you forward.

A legend has passed away

Death never fails to surprise me.

Kurt Vonnegut has passed away...curmudgeonly, but wise, smart but not overly cynical, a wonderful storyteller...a truth teller, really.

Today's verse on Biblegateway

“For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”

- 2 Corinthians 5:14-15

Power corrupts, or so they say, but who knew it also made you stupid?

Fascinating and sobering Op-ed in today's NYtimes. Read it and weep not - the message seems to be, "be careful." I'm not sure if it's the only conclusion one may draw from this, but I guess it's more evidence that money, power and prestige have a way of corrupting, and now there's evidence (and some funny stories) to suggest why and how.

***
New York Times

April 4, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me
By RICHARD CONNIFF
Old Lyme, Conn.
THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last year on the Pacific Coast Highway. I mention this only because it’s easy to get confused by the vast and highly repetitious category “Rich and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots.” Mr. Griffin walked away uninjured, and everybody offered wise counsel about how this wasn’t really such a bad day after all.

So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world? Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel (“I Own Malibu”) Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff’s car? And if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that they’re the ones with all the money?

Modern science has the answer, with a little help from the poet Hilaire Belloc.

Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.”

Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table.

It reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real life. One of them, for instance, had attended meetings with a magazine mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed to share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through an oral exam for his doctorate at which one faculty member not only picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light.

As stupid behaviors go, none of this is in a class with slamming somebody else’s Ferrari into a concrete wall. But science advances by tiny steps.

The researchers went on to theorize that getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them.

Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss, it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always green (and damn the pedestrians). Professor Keltner and his fellow researchers describe it as an instance of “approach/inhibition theory” in action: As power increases, it fires up the behavioral approach system and shuts down behavioral inhibition.

And thus the Fast Forward Personality is born and put on the path to the concrete barrier.

The corollary is that as the rich and powerful increasingly focus on potential rewards, powerless types notice the likely costs and become more inhibited. I happen to know the feeling because I once had my own Los Angeles Ferrari experience. It was a bright-red F355 Spider (and with a mere $150,000 sticker price, not exactly top shelf), which I rented for a television documentary about rich people. It came with a $10,000 deductible, and the first time I drove it into a Bel-Air estate, the low-slung front end hit the apron of the driveway with a horrible grating sound that caused my soul to shrink. I proceeded up the driveway at five miles an hour, and everyone in sight turned away thinking, “Rental.”

The bottom line: Without power, people tend to play it safe. Given power, even you and I would soon end up living large and acting like idiots. So pity the rich — and protect yourself. This is where Hilaire Belloc comes in.

He once wrote a poem about a Lord Finchley, who “tried to mend the Electric Light/Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!” Belloc wasn’t tiresomely suggesting that the gentry all deserve a first-hand acquaintance with the third rail, as it were, but merely that they would be smart to depend on hired help. In social psychology terms, disinhibited Fast Forward types need ordinary cautious mortals to remind them that the traffic lights do in fact occasionally turn yellow or even, sometimes, red.

So, Eddie Griffin: next time you borrow a pal’s car, borrow his driver, too. The world will be a safer place for the rest of us.

Richard Conniff is the author of “The Natural History of the Rich.”

The Good Friday Life

The title of an article on Christianity Today written by Mark Galli on a set of issues that I wrestle with - the role of religion in politics, the tension between sin and grace.

Here are a few thought-provoking excerpts from Galli's essay. I appreciate his honesty and humility - what we all need more of in this grace-starved world. The full article may be found by clicking here.

Many years ago, my wife and I were having a marital "moral discourse," and I was becoming increasingly agitated. In my fury, I yelled at her and aimed my fist at a section of the dining room wall. Unfortunately, the Holy Spirit failed to guide my hand between the studs, as he usually had done, and instead I hit a stud right on. I broke a knuckle.

A deathly silence settled in the room. While I came from a family in which nothing got done until someone yelled, Barb came from a family in which yelling brought things to a standstill. She was not going to speak to me for weeks. As I writhed in physical pain, I also writhed in emotional pain. I was a moral failure of a husband.

***

As I tried awkwardly, with one hand, to sweep up the bits of sheetrock strewn on the floor, I felt a hand on my arm. I turned around, and it was Barb. She said something apologetic. I said something apologetic. And then she embraced me for a long time.

She had every right to pronounce a grand moral imperative, condemn my behavior, and distance herself from me. That surely would have taught me a lesson. Instead, she embraced the angry sinner, and rather than teaching me a lesson, she helped heal me.

This Friday we Christians celebrate a similar event, albeit one of cosmic proportions. In his life, Jesus so identified with the immoral, spent so much time with them, that the good people of his day mistook him for a sinner. On Good Friday, Jesus continued the story. He did not distance himself from sin as much as embrace it in himself. And by this embrace, he made redemption possible.

***

For the Christian, moral discourse begins by focusing not on the sins of the other but on one's own failures. "O God, be merciful to me, a sinner." It is the publican's humble prayer that is accepted by God, and it is the Pharisee—who is confident of his morality and the other's immorality—who is condemned. Moral discourse begins, as Jesus said, by taking the log out of our own eye.

Rarely do we hear a politician publicly concede wrongdoing. A stunning exception to this was demonstrated to me last year in Vietnam. I was part of a delegation that was pressing the government to grant more religious freedom. One official in the ministry of foreign affairs startled me when he said, "On our part, we're not saying that we are error- or mistake- free. That is why we very much want to improve things."

Would that more Christian activists—even behind closed doors—framed their public denunciations by admitting their own political shortcomings first.

A Christian account of the world, though, goes even deeper. For the politician, immorality is "redeemed" by public condemnation and by distancing oneself from the immoral. The disciple of Jesus, however, embraces the immoral and opens the door of redemption by that very embrace.