prayer requests

Don’t feel much like arguing today.  I was on the way home from the hospital visiting my grandpa. He’s stable and resting, they’re doing tests, he might have a staph infection.  So I decide to stop and get food at the drive thru, and this young man is there.  He wasn’t the typical guy with a cardboard sign, if fact he was startlingly honest. He told me that he had just got out prison a little while back and he was just hoping to get food and a room and maybe get high. I figured I could handle the food part since I was in the drive thru anyway.  I got the combo meal he said sounded good and talked a little with him.  I’ll be honest; part of my mind was still back at the emergency room and also with my grandmother at home.  That might be part of the reason it took a little while for the conversation to sink in, for me to process what had just been said.  He told me that he lost everything:  his job, his fiancé, her family’s support, everything he cared about.  He said that he wanted to feel anything but what he was feeling just then even if it was only for a few hours.  His despair hit me hard.  He was just done with it, ready to stop caring at all what happens next. Screw it, I quit.  There wasn’t a thing I could do for him but give him some food and a couple bucks.  I didn’t know anyone hiring, and I certainly didn’t know any drug dealers.  I remember saying a few words about things getting better with time, but it sounded lame in retrospect. I remember thinking that I need to pray for this guy, but I didn’t tell him. I remember when I’ve been in bad situations, I felt less alone knowing someone was praying for me.  I’ve been kicking myself for not telling him I would pray for him, or even offering to pray with him right then.  Sometimes it’s enough to know someone else is paying even a little attention. I am angry with myself for not thinking to offer that to him.  But I will be praying.  If you think of it, if you could pray for this guy too I’d appreciate it. I’m ashamed to admit I don’t even know his name.

  Also my grandpa could use your prayers. He is comfortable and resting, but they are still doing tests and they may need to operate.

Epicly wimpy

"what if I fail? what if i'm not good enough? why was i cursed with these powers and this physique? do i really want mind bendingly awesome super powers? what if this outfit makes my butt look fat? what if mark jenkins from home-room doesn't like me as much as i like him? oh-my-gawd i could just die!"

when did super heroes become 13 year old girls? I just watched the green lantern and ryan reynolds spends the whole thing as a self obsessed, emotionally immature, morally ambivalent flake, and then in the last 5 minutes he decided that he was a hero after all. it was like the end of the wizard of oz. "lion: you had the courage you needed the whole time, and you Van Wild- uh, er, i mean green lantern: you had character and integrity all along.

i know that movie makers feel like they need to show the human-conflicted side of heroes so people can connect, but here's the thing. that is a hard thing to do and they are really bad at it. dark knight hit it pretty well, but then again all of the emotional issues were only there in bruce wayne and not batman. batman just showed up and took care of business.

most of the time when superheroes show their badly written, soft, squishy, emo-teen emotionality it's like my parents trying to discuss they're sex life with me. ew. no. why. stop it now.

Funerals are like being in a waiting room when you see someone called back. Some people want to talk about nothing but what's coming: how good the doctor is, what they are going to be healed of, why they chose this doctor, how long they have been here waiting. Others want to talk about anything but where they are and why: how about the weather, how about them (insert local sports team here), the weather has sure been nice, i'm going to get something to drink, you want anything? And some just tend to everyone else: are you nervous, hungry, thirsty concerned, need fresh magazines (i'm stretching the analogy i know). Then an atheist wanders in and asks how long the wait is for a table because he's really hungry and he heard this restaurant was great.

Nothing more than...

It’s underwhelmingly amazing how my feelings will accurately tell me what’s going on in my life. I’ve been feeling disconnected and apathetic in my faith and upon examining said life, I find that this is exactly how I’ve been acting. I have been skipping church and prayer and quiet time, and I feel it. As soon as I pray to invite God into my day and start back up where I left off in the bible (Hezekiah’s revival) I start to feel better. It’s not the long-term, everything-is-where-it-should-be kind of better, but it’s a start.

It’s like my diet. That has been off track as well. Regardless of what I know intellectually, the junk food still looked good and working out sounded like work. But I started back at the gym this week and I feel less like a slug, even though I haven’t started losing weight again, the feeling better is back already, except for my sore legs and butt). Like what Paul said, whenever he seeks to do good, evil is right there with him. I know this is a petty comparison, but it’s accurate. Whenever I seek to eat well, the junk food cravings are right there with me. Whenever I seek to get fit, laziness is right there with me. It’s true in the small things that dog us as much as it is the big things.

Voting

I got my mail in ballot today. I love it; civic responsibility for the totally apathetic. Political affiliation: meh. It’s difficult to care about issues when the side that always wins is the side with the most ad saturation. Facts are never represented fairly or honestly and the side that wants to screw people over is always the side that advertises itself as some kind of grass roots citizen action committee. Like this power utility law. I keep seeing commercials for it saying “we just want people to vote before governments go into the power business.” Except they want it to be a vote by 2/3 or ¾ majority, I forget which. You don’t even need 2/3 of the vote to amend the constitution, but they want it before a local government can start up a cogen plant? The truth is private companies want to ban public utilities. But local governments don’t have the money to fight the ad campaign battle, so they will probably lose.

I’ve decided to pick my candidates based on which ones have the least obnoxious commercials. That is about all I trust politicians to do: annoy me as little as possible. I don’t even care about political parties anymore. I’m equally disgusted with both parties. I’m tired of the way that the republicans have co-opted the Christian church based mostly on only two issues: abortion and gay marriage. In exchange we have to agree with guns for everyone without restrictions, more and bigger prisons with more and longer sentences, and we have to agree that the ultimate authority on what’s fair and right is the American Corporation. Big business gets to not only control agriculture, the environment, the economy, and energy industries, but they get to control the agencies that are supposed to oversee them as well. That isn’t really a republican only practice. At this point I just don’t think that a system as large as ours with the obscene amounts of money that run through it has a chance at being honest. So I’m going to choose the people most likely not to stress me out.

intellectual d-bagism

So I was finishing up this sci-fi fantasy novel I was reading and the climax was this chapter long speech about the triumph of reason over faith and how the human spirit will finally emerge and flourish when people overcome their useless religions. Bleh. First of all, that’s a terrible way to end a book. Not to mention it was written badly. If you have to say the same thing over and over, how much substance is there in what you’re saying. Second, it doesn’t take a couple dozen pages to say what I said in a sentence; if you can’t condense a tedious monologue, you are a bad writer. Second, I wanted so badly to argue, but I can’t argue with paper. Gah! Logic is just a way to check the reasoning in your arguments, it is not the end-all-be-all of philosophy. It’s just an empty frame, a blank structure. It offers nothing of any meaning in and of itself, and it certainly isn’t a foundation you can build a society on. Human nature has been borne out time and again, its not religion that has cause all of society’s ills, it’s the people that make up society. Religions, just like all other institutions, are made of people. People are greedy, mean, petty and cruel. With adequate push, or even just a flimsy pretense, people will do horrible things to each other. At times, religion has been that excuse, but more often it is something else, culture, ancestral right to a piece of land, business interests, politics, oil, whatever. The common denominator is people and their nature.

Also, faith is not the enemy of reason and logic; they go hand in hand. Even for those who are not religious, faith is still a preserver of sanity. It allows us to function by filling in the gaps between what we don’t know and what we must act on anyway. Logic, reason, common sense, whatever you want to call it, they allow you to contextualize and process what is already known; faith does the same for what is unknown. You could spend a lifetime learning everything you would need to know to function for a single day in absolute certainty, without any faith at all. To know how the electricity in your homes powergrid works, the quantum theory behind the semiconductor-based circuitry in your cell phone, the psychology of why those around you do what they do and how they’ll react to you. There is far too much information in the world for any one person to know. We believe in experts, texts, the internet (oh man don’t get me started), or what we hear from friends and family, all is taken in, faiths in various sources is ranked and compared and info is absorbed or discarded based on the results.

Besides this author (and many like him) is just substituting to make themselves sound less douchey. What they really mean by Indomitable Human Spirit is The Way I Think People Should Be, and logic and reason really mean My Point of View. With that in mind that stupid speech I read makes so much more sense.