A Christian Worldview from Silicon Valley

WARNING - This post is about golf…sorta…and doing the wrong thing…mostly…and paying for it in the end.

How does a sinner’s mind work? I don’t know about yours, but I reluctantly share here how my mind works.

I was hanging out at the Samsung LPGA World Championships in Half Moon Bay hoping secretly that the preacher was eating his heart out because I can smooze with Lorena Ochoa, the world’s #1 and Annika Sorenstam #2, and…okay, the world’s top 20golfin’ girls.

Feeling pretty good about myself because I can do what others cannot is the first step a sinner takes. Call it pride, I suppose.

Hole number four is a long one - 481 yards par 5. The neat thing, I think, is that to the left there is a long stretch of overgrowth. I usually notice these things because when I play my golf balls are quite apt at finding such places.

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When I was in high school about a hundred years ago, my grandfather said I should take typing and shorthand, courses rarely taken in those days by boys. His real reason might have been to get me to meet girls, but he said it was because those skills would be useful all my life. I looked around and noticed that my dad needed to type for his job, that papers often had to be typed, and so I took typing.

I got to be pretty good, but I never in my life learned to type like this:

The artist, er, typist of this piece was a man named Paul Smith, who was born in 1921 with severe cerebral palsy. You can read more about him, and see more of his amazing typing, at this web site.

Mr. Smith passed away in 2007, but he continues to inspire today. Seeing what he did, reading about his life and spirit, inspires me, in fact. Maybe it will inspire you to be patient with yourself as you work on your gifts and “keep on keeping on.” Maybe it will inspire you to not think of someone with an illness as less than they are. Maybe it will inspire you to glorify God with your life and gifts. Or maybe you’ll just look at this amazing work and wish you still had a typewriter.

“You Have Arrived”

How do you know when you get there?

That sounds like a simple enough question to answer, assuming you know the destination. And that isn’t always obvious.

Take my adventures during this past week, for instance. My wife and I, along with her mother and her brother and his wife, all planned on going on vacation together in Hawaii. You will note there are two destinations in that statement, and we only arrived at one of them.

The good news is, the one we failed to reach was the least important. We tried for two days to find adequate space on one of United Airlines‘ flights to Kauai, even traveling to Los Angeles in hopes of getting on a plane there. But we didn’t have any success, and the odds did not look good for the next day, either.

Realizing that our real destination was vacation, and not Hawaii, we selected a different geographical location — one that could be reached by car — and the next day found ourselves enjoying the beauty and relaxation of California’s Gold Country. (We might have headed east sooner, but our luggage did make it to Hawaii, so we made one more trip to San Francisco International Airport to retrieve it before leaving. That was the closest we came to the Islands, with the possible exception of using some Hawaiian Tropic sunscreen one day.)

As we headed for the hills, my brother-in-law put the address where we were staying into his GPS unit, and as we pulled up in front of the house the unit announced, “You have arrived.”

“Good to know,” I remarked. And I silently wondered if one day I would hear similar words from God.

But there are destinations to be reached before the ultimate destination, and one of those, the destination of spiritual maturity, is spoken of in Hebrews 5 and 6, especially in 6.1 which says, “Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity….”

Will you know when you get there? Will it be the place you thought you were going?

The Taliban admitted to being responsible for killing a Christian aid worker in Kabul.

Taliban gunment drove by on a motorbike in western Kabul and shot and killed 34-year old Gayle Williams as she walked to work. Her work, helping handicapped Afghans.

“This woman came to Afghanistan to teach Christianity to the people of Afghanistan,” militant spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told The Associated Press. “Our (leaders) issued a decree to kill this woman. This morning our people killed her in Kabul.”

How long, Oh Lord? How long?

The five last bastions of thinking are the car, the john, the shower, the church or synagogue, and the gym.

So says Joey Reiman, a “top” innovation consultant and CEO of BrightHouse (Inc. Magazine, June 2008, 102-03). On a page devoted to the topic, “how the creative stay creative,” the ideas included recommendations for organizations to:

• provide reflection-conducive space and time to think
• seek out diverse constituents
• reach across disciplines by inviting “luminaries” to speak and hang out
• publish inspiring thoughts, pictures, and articles for consumption by the group and beyond
• encourage flexibility by mixing up who does what on temporary teams to accomplish projects
• reward good ideas

and suggestions for individuals to:

• do something new, never before attempted
• be open to critique, ready for constructive interchange rather than defensive monologue

The notion that the church is a place to THINK is not commonly understood in our culture, but it’s spot-on. Far from being the “opiate of the masses,” the church community challenges participants to grapple with ideas of life-changing and world-impacting scope, to interpret scripture and bring it to bear on the given scenario of our complicated lives.

But how does the church score on displaying and encouraging creativity? This seems to vary a whole lot more from congregation to congregation, but in general we could do much better in this area.

In the beginning, God created…

Keith loves his shirts, especially the ratty, comfy ones. I’ve given up suggesting he throw them out or convert them to rags because he just says no, or, when pushed, “I prefer not.” I can’t fire his speaking coaches, Nancy Reagan and Bartleby the Scrivener. And I can’t just throw his stuff away without permission; I have my own integrity to maintain. What to do? I’m hoping a new strategy, admittedly passive aggressive, works: I leave the shirts hanging in the garage, where they stay in perpetuity, and he doesn’t see them because they are not in his closet. (Not gone, just “missing.”)

So today I put my plan in action. I went through our laundry limbo, the place where shirts are hung up upon their removal from the dryer. Instead of grabbing the whole lot to put away, I inspected each specimen for ragged collars and cuffs to leave behind. Mwoohahaha: I am woman, hear me roar.

Two men’s shirts stood out from the others. One, with a collar so frayed that only an outer layer of fabric remained attached, had been a $35 LL B–n catalog purchase for Keith’s birthday. It had shown significant signs of wear within a few months of acquisition (though two other Oxford shirts of exactly the same model and vintage still look great after a couple years’ wear). The other shirt, a Ralph Lauren Polo long-sleeved button-up, had been given to me 25 years ago, by my friend Patti Strawn, who scored it working an on-campus special sale; it still looks pristine.

I would have guessed that both of these shirts were high quality, but I would have been wrong. The costlier one was a complete waste of money (well, except that Keith really, really, really liked it), and the freebie would have been well worth the high retail value.

If you don’t have experience with fill-in-the-blank, it can be hard to judge what is treasure and what is trash. You’ll see what I mean at any garage sale. Sometimes you just have to hang out with something for a while before it becomes apparent what is what. But when you figure it out, for heaven’s sake — no, for your own sake — take out the trash!

Jesus had his own way of figuring out what had worth. As he put it,

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (NIV)

On Sunday, October 12, 2008, a significant part of the Palo Alto Church of Christ participated in worship service.

We often call — as do other churches — a “normal” Sunday morning gathering of the members a “worship service,” but it isn’t, really. We might be closer if we called it “a time of worship,” or “a gathering for worship,” but there is seldom any service to it.

In fact, there is so little actual service that the word service has come to mean (and this is the third meaning in my little dictionary) “a ceremony of religious worship according to a prescribed form; the prescribed form for such a ceremony : a funeral service.”

Now that describes most of our Sunday mornings. No, I don’t meant the funeral service, I mean the “worship according to a prescribed form” part. Ten songs, five from The Red Book, five from The Blue Book, three linked prayers (two for communion, one for offering), two prescribed prayers (opening and closing), one sermon (not too long), and a partridge in a pear tree.

We are not unique in doing almost exactly the same thing on one Sunday that we did the previous Sunday and that we will do the next Sunday. Many churches fall into a pattern, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. At least not until the form becomes more important than the content, or the outcome.

But this past Sunday, as I wrote earlier, we participated in worship service. How? We served people, and in doing so we worshiped God.

Would that all our worship were that genuine, that it would put us in such proximity with God.

In case you were wondering, the Sun has been going through a quiet phase this year.  Most news agencies ignore things that are working well preferring instead to report on the stock market, or some natural disaster. It turns out that every 11 years the Sun’s magnetic field sorta re-configures itself.  We are in the midst of a very quiet period of time right now. For the Sun.  That means there are very few sunspots and solar flares happening.   Most people go along and take for granted this star that our lives depend upon and never give it a second thought.  But, if you look a little closer, you will see the wonder of the thing right before your eyes, well at least those people reading this during the daylight hours.  Oh, and I suggest you use something safe to view the sun, like the internet.

Solar Picture

I’m a fan of quiet.  I’m glad our sun is a warm star, not too hot, and not too cold, but just right.  It would be more interesting if we had a double star, but then our solar system probably wouldn’t have nearby rocky planets to live on, so we have to live with our boring quiet medium sized star.  Still, I find it quietly speaking to me.  Psalms 19

Did anybody else notice that the PACC blog now has a Page Rank of 2? That and $5 will get you breakfast at Peet’s. But, PR2 is better than PR0 and closer to PR4 or 5.

Page Rank is a valuation that Google places on a blog that takes into account content originality, longevity of the blog and consistency in posting as well as frequency of comments and their quality as well. Of course, Google is apt to have more variables in its algorithm for determining PR, but these are the basics.

There are debates in the blogosphere about how to please Google, how to climb the PR ladder, how to please the Landlord, John would say.

PR is important to some. The better the PR the more apt a writer is to be heard/read/found by the multitudes when they write about current events. The more a writer is read, the better the PR, the more they are read…this kind of thing.

It’s interesting that the first two letters in Google are the same as the first two letters in the name of the the one we want to please…God. Though, make no mistake about it, the similarities stop there as far as I am concerned. (more…)