From my journal: “As I try to clean up my office from the piles of papers which have accumulated in all the speaking I’ve been doing, I find myself wondering if there are more than a few times when I just might miss the point of all that I am speaking about. How do we get so busy that we risk slipping away from the core of faith which is bound up in the simple fact that we are called to love, to obey and to serve the living God that Jesus reveals to us?”
I clipped this from a book review: Reflecting on Deborah Cramer’s book Great Waters, a book on environmentalism, Michael Parfit says, “She’s selling despair, not motivation. This willingness to incorporate shaky information as long as it supports her thesis mars the book. Worse, Cramer’s focus on the hobnails in the human footprint gives no real weight to the efforts—and successes—of millions of people who have changed their way of life to make less impact or who have worked hard to protect watersheds and coral reefs, individual species of seabirds and fish, or natural beauty. She’s selling despair, not motivation.”
The value of this comment. It sheds light on a temptation that many preachers and organizational leaders face every week when they want to raise money or hold crowds: to underscore only the darknesses of people and events in the world so that one can promote his or her answers and systems of thought. The subtle message: things are really, really bad, and I alone have the solution. Sometimes this means shading the truth, shouting loud, massaging surveys, using quotes which may or may not be entirely truthful. But it does gain the loyalty of unthinking people.
This happened all too often in the days of the Y2K “crisis.” Remember Y2K and the folks who had us frightened half out of our minds? How quickly they became silent; how fast the “crisis” got buried after January 2, 2000. But Y2K did raise a lot of cash for some. I guess I’d hoped that some who sold all that despair would give the money back. But I guess I was just dreaming.
Book from a friend: Anne Lamott’s rather irreverent Traveling Mercies. Perhaps there are a few in our evangelical neighborhood that would be put off by Lamott’s use of profanity, even her frankness about her own living situation at various times in her life. But I can’t help being drawn into her story of life-journey. She is the woman religious people love to despise; but the kind that Jesus so dearly loves. Her one chapter about the onset of her conversion is worth the price of the book. Get it in paperback.
There’s got to be a sermon illustration in here somewhere: My brother writes of a television interview with a balloonist who was grounded by the weather at a national ballooning festival. When asked if he was disappointed, he said, “I would rather be on the ground wishing I was in the air, than be in the air wishing I was on the ground.
These thoughts provokes me: Ellie Wiesel speaks of a prophet who came to a city and delivered his message every day in the market place. Soon everyone ignored his all-to-familiar message, and if they noticed him, it was only to laugh. A small boy, pitying the prophet, asked, “Sir, why do you keep crying aloud like this every day, year after year. The people here will never listen to you.”
“I gave up hope,” was the reply, ” that they would listen to me a long time ago. I go on crying lest I begin listening to them.”
My wife, Gail slips this into my backpack as I head for Europe: May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may wish for justice, freedom, and peace. May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. (A Franciscan blessing)
You know you’ve neglected the Sabbath discipline when: Houston Smith tells of a legend on the lips of people at MIT. Edward Land and his partner were at the decisive point in their discovery of the process that led to the Polaroid camera. They’d been working around the clock day after day, sleeping only when necessary, and that on laboratory tables. At one point Land’s partner said he was exhausted and would have to take a break.
“Good,” Land said, “we can get our Christmas shopping out of the way.”
“Ed,” his partner said, “Ed! It’s January 3rd.”
A note to those who wrote about my questions regarding war. Hey! They were only questions (smile).
— Gordon MacDonald, editor-at-large
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