Good Enough
This is from Rick Warren’s Daily Hope send out for today, and for me, it really hits home. So many times I hesitate to step up to the plate, waiting until I am sure my skills are what is needed, when what is really needed is just for someone to have the courage to step up, to speak out.
The best ‘Christian’ person I know, who follows this Christian principle, was born Muslim. She is always the first to serve, and the last to take anything. She is the first to give and the first to start cleaning up after an event. She is never afraid to get her hands dirty, or to defend the dignity of ‘the least of these.’
Real servants do their best with what they have. Servants don’t make excuses, procrastinate, or wait for better circumstances. Servants never say, “One of these days” or “When the time is right.” They just do what needs to be done.
The Bible says, “If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done” (Ecclesiastes 11:4 NLT).
God expects you to do what you can, with what you have, wherever you are. Less-than-perfect service is always better than the best intention.
One reason many people never serve is that they fear they are not good enough to serve. They have believed the lie that serving God is only for superstars. Some churches have fostered this myth by making “excellence” an idol, which makes people of average talent hesitant to get involved.
You may have heard it said, “If it can’t be done with excellence, don’t do it.” Well, Jesus never said that! The truth is, almost everything we do is done poorly when we first start doing it — that’s how we learn.
At Saddleback Church, we practice the “good enough” principle: It doesn’t have to be perfect for God to use and bless it. We would rather involve thousands of regular folks in ministry than have a perfect church run by a few elites.
Heartache in Pensacola
It’s a beautiful full moon over the oil soaked beaches of Pensacola. There is a beach advisory against children on the beach, against pregnant women or people with weak immune systems being on the beach. The surf is contaminated with oil and VOC, which is volatile organic compounds, whatever that means, it is bad.
Save This for a Down Day
Thank you, Kuwait friend, for this wonderful video “Free Hugs.” You can’t help but smile after watching it. 🙂
Skinniest People Shop at Whole Foods
This study is hysterical. It tracked who shopped where, and found that the people who shop at Whole Foods had a far smaller probability of being obese. They concluded that the poorer the consumer, the less healthy the foods.
I found this on AOL Health.
Skinniest People Grocery Shop HERE
By AOL Health Editors Jun 8th 2010 10:56AM
The skinniest people shop at Whole Foods where only 4 percent of the shoppers are obese. Why? It’s all about money–or lack thereof.
People who are poor and have less to spend on food try to get the biggest calorie bang for their food buck. That means they not only shop at cheaper stores, but also buy less healthy food.
The study: A University of Washington research team tracked 2,001 Seattle area shoppers between December 2008 and March 2009. They compared their choice of supermarkets to data they collected on the participants’ education, income and obesity rates. Obesity rates were measured by asking consumers to report their height and weight so their body mass index (BMI) could be calculated. People with a BMI higher than 30 were identified as obese.
The results: The percentage of obese shoppers is almost 10 times higher at low-cost grocery stores, compared with more upscale stores. And poverty is the key reason.
Lead study author Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiology professor who studies obesity and social class, says people who can pay $6 for a pound of radicchio at Whole Foods are obviously better able to afford a healthy diet than those who buy $1.88 packs of pizza rolls at Albertson’s to feed their kids. “If people wanted a diet to be cheap, they went to one supermarket,” Drewnowski told MSNBC. “If they wanted their diet to be healthy, they went to another supermarket and spent more.” He found that only 15 percent of shoppers chose a store based on its proximity to their home. Instead, almost all the shoppers chose a store based on price or quality.
Sticker shock: All the stores offered the same type of food, including fresh fruits and vegetables. But the prices were vastly different. The average price for a market basket of food at Whole Foods was between $370 and $420, compared with the same basket of food at Albertson’s for $225 to $280.
“Deep down, obesity is really an economic issue,” Drewnowski told MSNBC. Eating healthy, low-calorie food costs more money and requires more preparation skills and time than consuming processed, high-calorie foods. MSNBC reports that in a separate study in 2008, Drewnowski estimated that a calorie-dense diet costs $3.52 a day, compared with $36.32 a day for a low-calorie diet. “What this says is your social economic status is clearly associated with how overweight you are,” he told MSNBC.
Grocery stores and percentage of obese shoppers:
• Whole Foods Markets: 4 percent
• Metropolitan Market: 8 percent
• Puget Consumers Cooperative (PCC): 12 percent
• Quality Food Centers (QFC): 17 percent
• Fred Meyer: 22 percent
• Safeway: 24 percent
• Albertsons: 38 percent
— From the Editors at Netscape
Saudi Clerics Advocate Adult Breast-Feeding
This really, really needs to go away. It makes no sense, none, for adult women to breastfeed a grown man in order to get around the rules that unrelated men and women should not be in contact with one another.
You can read this article and related articles on AOL News
Dana Kennedy
Contributor
(June 5) — Women in Saudi Arabia should give their breast milk to male colleagues and acquaintances in order to avoid breaking strict Islamic law forbidding mixing between the sexes, two powerful Saudi clerics have said. They are at odds, however, over precisely how the milk should be conveyed.
A fatwa issued recently about adult breast-feeding to establish “maternal relations” and preclude the possibility of sexual contact has resulted in a week’s worth of newspaper headlines in Saudi Arabia. Some have found the debate so bizarre that they’re calling for stricter regulations about how and when fatwas should be issued.
Sheikh Al Obeikan, an adviser to the royal court and consultant to the Ministry of Justice, set off a firestorm of controversy recently when he said on TV that women who come into regular contact with men who aren’t related to them ought to give them their breast milk so they will be considered relatives.
“The man should take the milk, but not directly from the breast of the woman,” Al Obeikan said, according to Gulf News. “He should drink it and then becomes a relative of the family, a fact that allows him to come in contact with the women without breaking Islam’s rules about mixing.”
Obeikan said the fatwa applied to men who live in the same house or come into contact with women on a regular basis, except for drivers.
Al Obeikan, who made the statement after being asked on TV about a 2007 fatwa issued by an Egyptian scholar about adult breast-feeding, said that the breast milk ought to be pumped out and given to men in a glass.
But his remarks were followed by an announcement by another high-profile sheik, Abi Ishaq Al Huwaini, who said that men should suckle the breast milk directly from a woman’s breast.
Shortly after the two sheiks weighed in on the matter, a bus driver in the country’s Eastern Region reportedly told one of the female teachers whom he drives regularly that he wanted to suckle milk from her breast. The teacher has threaten to file a lawsuit against him.
The fatwa stems from the tenets of the strict Wahhabi version of Islam that governs modern Saudi Arabia and forbids women from mixing with men who are not relatives. They are also not allowed to vote, drive or even leave the country without the consent of a male “guardian.”
Under Islamic law, women are encouraged to breast-feed their children until the age of 2. It is not uncommon for sisters, for example, to breast-feed their nephews so they and their daughters will not have to cover their faces in front of them later in life. The custom is called being a “breast milk sibling.”
But under Islamic law, breast milk siblings have to be breastfed before the age of 2 in five “fulfilling” sessions. Islam prohibits sexual relations between a man and any woman who breastfed him in infancy. They are then allowed to be alone together when the man is an adult because he is not considered a potential mate.
“The whole issue just shows how clueless men are,” blogger Eman Al Nafjan wrote on her website. “All this back and forth between sheiks and not one bothers to ask a woman if it’s logical, let alone possible to breastfeed a grown man five fulfilling breast milk meals.
“Moreover, the thought of a huge hairy face at a woman’s breast does not evoke motherly or even brotherly feelings. It could go from the grotesque to the erotic but definitely not maternal.”
Al Nafjan said many in the country were appalled by the fatwa.
“We have many important issues that need discussing,” Al Nafjan told AOL News Friday. “It’s ridiculous to spend time talking about adult breast-feeding.”
Unlawful mixing between the sexes is taken very seriously in Saudi Arabia. In March 2009, a 75-year-old Syrian widow, Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi, living in the city of Al-Chamil, was given 40 lashes and sentenced to six months in prison after the religious police learned that two men who were not related to her were in her house, delivering bread to her.
One of the two men found in her house, Fahd, told the police that Sawadi breast-fed him as a baby so he was considered a son and had a right to be there. But in a later court ruling, a judge said it could not be proved that Fahd was her “breast milk son.” Fahd was sentenced to four months in prison and 40 lashes, and the man who accompanied him got six months and 60 lashes.
The original adult breast-feeding fatwa was issued three years ago by an Egyptian scholar at Egypt’s al-Azhar University, considered Sunni Islam’s top university. Ezzat Attiya was expelled from the university after advocating breast-feeding of men as a way to circumnavigate segregation of the sexes in Egypt.
A year ago, Attiya was reinstated to his post.
Mongolian Porn
Today as I was emptying my spam folder, I glanced through and saw that one encouraged us to visit a site specializing in Mongolian Porn.
Somehow, that totally cracks me up. Porn is pathetic and laughable enough as it is, but . . . Mongolian porn? I cannot imagine . . .
Maybe they yak a lot?
Kuwait or Qatar or Pensacola?
Showering after my water-aerobics class, I could hear voices discussing a local political-social situation. A benefits agency has groups of families working in it, and they know all the tricks. They know how to insure more of their own family members hired, and they know how to help all their family members (and friends) take advantage of all the entitlements.
Expats abroad call it nepotism, and scorn it as a third-world corruption. In truth, it happens everywhere.
There is an ongoing schism taking place in Qatar and Kuwait, countries that have been gracious and welcoming to me. The nationals of Kuwait and Qatar control citizenship carefully. The citizen base is about 20% of the population, on a good day. The rest of the population are people who are in Kuwait and Qatar to work. Most there to work can never hope for citizenship. For many, the poverty in their home country is so brutal that no matter how hard the working conditions, at least it is a salary, and they can send something home so that, literally, their families can eat. They dream – like we do – of educating their children so that they will have a better, more secure life.
Here is the problem. When 80% of the population is NON-Kuwaiti, or NON-Qatari, your country starts to change. One way in which things have changes is that in a very short time, the highways have gone from very quiet to gridlock, due to a dramatic increase in drivers and cars. In Qatar, the situation is made worse by nationalization of the taxi service, resulting in so few taxis that hotels now use private limo services, because finding a taxi at peak times is near to impossible.
That’s one issue. The second issue is language. Imagine your elderly parents going into shops to buy something – in their own country – and the clerks don’t speak their language. As they are stumbling and bewildered, some noisy “workers” walk in, state their needs, are understood, conduct their business and exit before you even get served. This is happening in Kuwait and in Qatar; everyone is speaking English. In a country where the workers are Indian, Nepalese, Philipino, Saudi, Yemani, Omani, Lebanese, Syrian, French, Dutch, English, Australian, South African, American (and about thirty or forty others) the common language has evolved to be English, not Arabic.
How do you think you would feel if it were happening here? If the great majority of cars on the road were not “us” but “guests” in our country? If the clerks in stores couldn’t understand what you want, because although they are in your country, they don’t speak your language?
Another problem is what to do with the huge, disproportionate number of geographically single males brought in to work as builders, cleaners, heavy equipment operators, dishwashers, drivers, security guards and other fairly low-paid positions? In Kuwait and in Qatar, non-married sex is strictly forbidden, even holding hands in public is considered an affront to morality. These men are banned from malls where families might gather, and from other public places. Their existence is grim, and they often find themselves unpaid, or paid far less than they were promised for their labor.
Last, but not least, this very modest Gulf culture has people – foreign guest workers – parading themselves on their streets in various states of undress. Think about it – that’s how we look to them. We have no shame. We bare our faces. We flaunt the glory of our uncovered hair. Sometimes a shawl might drop and a glimpse of bare arm or even a hint of cleavage might shock the modest eyes of a believer.
In Pensacola, there are also fundamentalists who wear long skirts, long sleeves, and determinedly modest clothing. I wonder what these believers think about the skimpy clothing on the beaches, or in the malls?
Coming home has been a real eye opener. It was easy for me to be critical of things I saw in Qatar and in Kuwait. Coming home, we joke all the time about “Kuwaiti drivers” here in the US, but the real joke is – they sure look a lot like us.
Last week, we saw a man here make a U-turn right in the middle of the road, and rock as he tried to regain control of his truck, and almost blast right through a red light he didn’t see. The back of his truck was down, and items loose in the truck bed were heading toward the highway – fortunately he figured that out, and last we saw, he had stopped to fix his rear door. Maybe he wasn’t sober. Maybe he had had an argument with his wife or boss or someone and was not paying close attention to his driving. All I know is that we have seen a goodly number of inattentive drivers here, too.
When a bureaucracy gets corrupted, when the rules are not applied equally to all, when select groups get favored treatment – here in Pensacola, at the immigration department in Kuwait or in the traffic department in Qatar – everyone suffers. It’s a political problem, a social problem, and a systemic problem. God willing, if we are truly evolving as a species, we will find a way to create truly fair and transparent systems which will work as they are ideally intended to work.
It’s on us. We have to make it happen. We have to want it badly enough to make it happen, even making sacrifices for the greater good.
I don’t have any answers. I don’t know how to make us better people that we are, how to make ourselves make the right choices. I do know this – whether it is a tiny village in Germany, or an eagle’s aerie in Kuwait, or the lush life of Doha – we are all more alike, and share more similarities and problems, than we are different. If we could only learn to see through one another’s eyes, maybe we could find ways to resolve our differences and learn to cooperate.
Saudi Woman Attacks Muttawa
I found this on AOL News
“People are fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years,” she was quoted as saying. “This is just the beginning and there will be more resistance.”
(May 18) — An angry young Saudi Arabian woman has left her mark on a religious policeman who approached her for illegally socializing with an unmarried young man.
According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman strongly objected to the policeman’s interference and repeatedly punched him so hard that he ended up in the hospital with bruises to his face and body.
The couple, believed to be in their 20s, were strolling through an amusement park in the city of Al-Mubarraz when the policeman asked them to confirm their relationship to one another.
Hasan Jamali, AP
In Saudi Arabia, women aren’t allowed to drive or to appear in public without a male guardian.
For unknown reasons, the man collapsed while being questioned, and the woman jumped in with fists flying, Okaz reported, according to arabianbusiness.com.
No statement on the incident has so far been made by the religious police – formally titled the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – or by the regular police, the Arab site and The Jerusalem Post reported.
If the unidentified woman is charged she could face a long prison term, as well as body lashes.
“To see resistance from a woman means a lot,” Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, a Saudi women’s rights activist, told The Media Line News Agency, The Post reported.
“People are fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years,” she was quoted as saying. “This is just the beginning and there will be more resistance.”
“The media and the Internet have given people a lot of power and the freedom to express their anger,” she added. Whatever the religious police do ends up all over the Internet, she said, which gives them “a horrible reputation and gives people power to react.”
Under Saudi law, women are not allowed to drive, be seen in public without a male guardian and socialize with unrelated men.
A decision to open the country’s first co-educational university last year was strongly criticized by a senior Saudi cleric, who was then fired by King Abdullah, The Post reported.
The Shrimp Basket
Even though The Shrimp Basket has specials like 25 cent oysters all day on Tuesdays, and even though the first time, I really did order the steamed shrimp, it is hard to walk into the Shrimp Basket and not to order something fried.
I can go for years most of the time and never eat anything deep fried. It just isn’t that important to me. I can see that living in Pensacola, it is going to be a serious challenge, because so much is deep fried, and holy tomole, it all smells so good. Fried onion rings. Fried fish. Fried shrimp. Fried seafood platters. Fried grouper sandwiches. Stop! Stop! You’re killing me!
Pensacola is a real military town, and loves their Blue Angels, the Navy stunt flying team. The Blue Angels practice on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, and have autograph signings after the practice and anyone in Pensacola can go and it’s FREE!
There is often a waiting line to get into the Shrimp Basket because of their specials. On Fridays, the special is all you can eat Fried Fish for $7.99.
When you finish the first batch, you just tell the waitress you want some more. We ordered it, but we could only eat the first batch, there was so much fish. They also have very cool and colorful T-shirts for Shrimp Basket fans:
Señor Driving
You get a reduction on your insurance rates if you take the safe driving classes for seniors. AdventureMan still isn’t all that comfortable with being a senior, so he calls himself “señor,” which is ‘Mister’ in Spanish. He tells people we are taking “señor” driving classes, and everyone looks at him like he is a little nuts.
Well. . . he is, actually. More than just a little. And now he has the time and energy to be a full time nut, and more power to him.
The “señor” driving classes were actually all right. We learned some things we didn’t know, and we met some interesting people, one, a retired New York fireman, and his wife, a retired nurse. They invited us to go eat seafood after class, and we learned all kinds of things.
On our way back from the ladies room, his wife leaned over to me and whispered “Is he helping you?” I laughed. I knew what she meant. “Yes!” I whispered back, “So far, so good!”
Living in Kuwait and in Qatar, most of the people were younger than us. Countries with all kinds of imported labor put upper limits on workers, so they don’t have a lot of old guys kicking the bucket in their countries. You can get exceptions to the rules in certain jobs, and we had a lot of good friends around our ages, thank God, but here in Pensacola, we feel like YOUNG older people – there are so many older people, and so much to learn. They are all really good about sharing their tricks for survival, and we find that keeping our ears open is a good thing.
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