Reading for Saturday, October 16 from Sirach
I love it when our daily Lectionary heads into Sirach, one of the books Episcopalians and Catholics use (and maybe the Orthodox churches, I am not so sure) but which are not included in the Protestant bibles; I find the texts often illuminate or expand my understanding of other readings.
Sirach 3:17-31
17 My child, perform your tasks with humility;*
then you will be loved by those whom God accepts.
18 The greater you are, the more you must humble yourself;
so you will find favour in the sight of the Lord.*
20 For great is the might of the Lord;
but by the humble he is glorified.
21 Neither seek what is too difficult for you,
nor investigate what is beyond your power.
22 Reflect upon what you have been commanded,
for what is hidden is not your concern.
23 Do not meddle in matters that are beyond you,
for more than you can understand has been shown to you.
24 For their conceit has led many astray,
and wrong opinion has impaired their judgement.
25 Without eyes there is no light;
without knowledge there is no wisdom.*
26 A stubborn mind will fare badly at the end,
and whoever loves danger will perish in it.
27 A stubborn mind will be burdened by troubles,
and the sinner adds sin to sins.
28 When calamity befalls the proud, there is no healing,
for an evil plant has taken root in him.
29 The mind of the intelligent appreciates proverbs,
and an attentive ear is the desire of the wise.
30 As water extinguishes a blazing fire,
so almsgiving atones for sin.
31 Those who repay favours give thought to the future;
when they fall they will find support.
A Thankful Heart
Happy Thanksgiving to all our Canadian friends, who celebrate their Thanksgiving today. I wish each of you a thankful heart and a day full of blessings.
Yesterday at Christs Church, The Rev. Neal Goldsborough talked to us about thankful hearts, and how a thankful heart precedes faith. So I wish you all, all my readers, thankful hearts.
(photo from the archives of The Ames Historical Society)
New Territory: Pensacola Medicine
It’s payback time. Since AdventureMan and I retired, we have been trying to catch up with all the things we have left undone as we lived overseas. One of those things is catching up on medical work, you know, the preventive stuff.
One of the things I avoided in Qatar and Kuwait were any kind of procedures where something alien entered your body. There are good hospitals, and there are good doctors, but you have to know someone who can recommend them, and they they have to accept you as patients. My strategy was simply to stay well. I had a constant concern, about the cleanliness of the hospitals, about the conscientiousness of the people sterilizing medical equipment, about patient care, about credentials of those putting in IV’s – little things like that.
When I came to Pensacola, LOL, I had the same concerns. We have this illusion that everything is better in the USA, but we are only as good as our rules, and the enforcement of the rules, and when budgets are being cut, code enforcement can suffer. Who is checking on the cleanliness of the facility, etc. can be an issue here, too.
We ran into a couple of breaks. We have friends here, and we also have good advisory people. While our advisory people are not allowed to give specific recommendations, we had a long and lively chat with one and we asked, at the end, “if your Mom or Dad needed a good overall internist, who would you send them to?” and she paused and gave us a name.
The name was also on our short list of doctors we had looked up online. There are all kinds of places that comment on doctors, and this doctor has all A’s.
My visit with the doctor got me started on a lot of other appointments. The first visit, however, had a very funny moment. We were talking, generally, I thought, about weight, and he said “what do you think would be a good weight for you at this age” and I thought and said a number and HE WROTE IT DOWN. “Oh no!” I said. “Are you writing it down?”
“Yes.” he responded. “I agree, I think that is a good goal for you.”
GOAL??? I talk a lot about exercise and trying to lose weight, but now I am expected to meet a goal??? Oh, aaaarrrggghh. Me and my big mouth, why did I pick that number???
My Pensacola medical experience grew this week as I had a dreaded colonoscopy, something older people have to do as part of preventive maintenance. I totally hate colonoscopy preparation, and I also know that the same problems that happen in Qatar and Kuwait can happen here in Pensacola, so I was anxious the day of the procedure.
As I was pushed into the operating room by a young guy, I asked “who are you?” and he said he was the doctor. I interviewed him, asking about his certification, etc. and his record. He could see I was anxious.
Finally, I asked, in desperation, “are you Christian?” and he said “yes,” and then added “Would you like us to pray together before we start?” I was shocked. I paused, trying to deal with this new information – you are allowed to pray in the operating room?
“Yes,” I said, “please.”
They put hands on me and prayed for guidance during the procedure, and safety and a positive outcome. That is the last I remember, I felt so secure, and then I woke up and it was over. The outcome was positive.
There is no such thing as not allowing prayer in the schools or public places. People can pray wherever they want. The only thing forbidden is prayers where everyone is forced to pray together, the same words, words that may not express the same faith. We don’t all share the same beliefs, we don’t all pray in the same vocabularies. But we are free to pray, no one can stop the prayers of the heart.
What Mormons Do Right
Today, after church, AdventureMan took me to my very favorite place in Pensacola, Tudo’s (Vietnamese) and as we were waiting for our food, and our take out order (the Happy Baby has a bad cold so we are also taking lunch to his Mom and Dad) I notice the guys in the next booth are speaking in a foreign language, and because I don’t speak it, I can only guess, it was perhaps Maylay.
I think they had to be Mormons. They were in their twenties, and very clean cut. Two were probably foreign students, and two were in white shirts with ties, and dark pants, what I think of as Mormon-boys-on-their-mission dress, and it carries over into post-mission life. We saw them often, two by two, in Germany and in France, sometimes singing, sometimes going door to door, sometimes passing out pamphlets. They always spoke the language of the country they were in, maybe not so well at the beginning, but at the end of their two year mission, they spoke it pretty well.
From time to time, at the next table, they were all four speaking the same language, and it was not English.
So lets say, from a strategic point of view, that our goal is to spread the ‘good news’ (which, oh by the way, it is.) Doesn’t it just make sense that you make an effort to speak the language of your target nationality?
You would be amazed at how few of the other denominations who send ministers and evangelists overseas, how very few of them have much training in the language of the people they will be serving, or ministering to, or trying to share the good news with. You would not be amazed that when you are trying to communicate, especially big ideas, it really helps to be able to communicate. It also shows respect for another country and another culture, and humility to learn other languages and other ways. I can imagine that much of their success comes from an ability to build a personal relationship, and that is more likely to happen if you speak their language.
I am not Mormon, as you know, and I admire much of what they do right – I admire their neighborliness, their obligation to reach out and help where help is needed, and their stewardship of resources, built right into practicing the religion. I especially admire their ability to teach languages to the young missionaries they send out, and their vast library of genealogical resources.
Lying Prompts Need for Cleansing!
Lying makes you want to wash your mouth out, LOL! Who thinks up these studies?? I found this on AOL News:
Parents who punished their fibbing children by washing their mouths out with soap may have been onto something.
Researchers at the University of Michigan found that people who lie have the urge to wash their “dirty” mouths afterwards, apparently in an effort to wipe themselves clean of their bad behavior.
“Not only do people want to clean after a dirty deed, they want to clean the specific body part involved,” study author Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist at the university’s Institute for Social Research, said in a statement.
Schwarz and co-author Spike W.S. Lee asked 87 students to pretend they were lawyers who were competing with an imaginary coworker, “Chris,” for a promotion. They were told to picture finding an important document Chris had misplaced. If they gave it back to him, it would help his career and harm theirs.
Participants were instructed to send Chris an e-mail or leave him a voicemail message in which they either told him the truth — that they’d discovered the lost report — or lied to him, saying they couldn’t find the missing paper.
The subjects then had to rate how much they wanted certain products, including mouthwash and hand sanitizer, and what they were willing to pay for them. They were told the items were the focus of a market research survey.
The students who had lied on the phone felt a stronger desire for mouthwash and were willing to pay more for it than those who hadn’t told the truth over e-mail, the authors said. But those who lied over e-mail had a greater wish for hand sanitizer and were willing to pay more for it than those who’d fibbed on the phone, according to the research.
Those who had been truthful had less of an urge to buy either product.
In other words, the scientists concluded, verbal lies compelled the liars to want to buy mouthwash; lying with their hands by typing an untruthful e-mail made them more drawn to hand sanitizer.
“The references to ‘dirty hands’ or ‘dirty mouths’ in everyday language suggest that people think about abstract issues of moral purity in terms of more concrete experiences with physical purity,” Lee, a Michigan doctoral candidate in psychology, said in a statement.
University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Dr. Christos Ballas told AOL Health that the compulsion to buy hand sanitizer may have been for another reason entirely.
“The preference for hand sanitizer may well be related to the fact that they were typing on someone else’s computer keyboard,” he joked.
He said the scientists should have examined whether the the cleaning products had any impact on the liars’ future behavior.
“An even better study to conduct would be whether the availability of mouthwash/sanitizer reduces ‘guilt’ feelings, or makes it more likely they’ll lie the next time,” Ballas said.
In the end, he believes the findings, which appear in the October issue of Psychological Science, tell us more about the relationship between language and our subconscious than they do about the desire to wash ourselves clean of our sins.
“We interpret this as ‘lies make you feel dirty.’ And so the resultant mouthwash makes sense,” said Ballas. “But this is a purely semantic relationship. What if lies made you feel … small? Would you reach for platform shoes? Thus, the real insight here wouldn’t be that lies make us feel dirty, but that our unconscious is entirely dependent on our language.”
Show Me the Money
Two themes came together, early this Sunday morning in Pensacola, first, as Father Harry spoke to us at Christ Church this morning on stewardship, and giving generously, and then later, as I was reading my Sunday Pensacola News Journal, an article on our elected officials, and their finances, their net worth and where their money is coming from.
Father Harry spoke about the rich man, at whose gate Lazarus begs, covered with sores, and then, at death, how the rich man asks God to send Lazarus to wet his lips, as he burns in the eternal hellfires, and Lazarus sits with God. He also asks God to send Lazarus to warn his rich family members that their choices, their lack of generosity, will have consequences, but God says (I paraphrase here) that Moses already told them, and earlier prophets, and that if the rich didn’t listen to them, they are not going to listen to Lazarus.
To me, it seems a given, that if you are blessed with plenty, then you have an obligation to help those who struggle. It isn’t necessarily money, it can be food, it can be time, it can be expertise, or – in my case – it can even be fabric. 🙂 We learn it in pre-school and kindergarten, don’t we? Share what you have, and everyone gets along.
It totally boggles my mind that many of our good friends, government and military people, have excellent health care under a highly socialized system – that’s what the military health care system is all about, we all have access to the same treatment. Many of the people who have access to medical treatment become rabid about supporting health care for those who don’t. Part of it seems to be “I earned it, and those lazy bums expect it for nothing.”
Most of my life, I’ve worked with ‘those lazy bums’ and have grown to have a lot of understanding and compassion for the circumstances that can make an entire family bone poor. Sometimes, it is poor choices – but how do people learn to make better choices without help? How do people aspire to more when they think that the ‘more’ is inaccessible to them?
The face of our nation changed after World War II when many more Americans gained access to higher education as a veteran’s benefit; prior to the GI Bill, higher education was only available to those comfortable people who could afford it.
Also in today’s Pensacola News Journal is an article about Study: Educating Women Saves Millions of Children which is an Associated Press Story about a study published this month in Lancet. “Educated women tend to use health services more and often make better choices on hygiene, nutrition and parenting,” the study (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) concludes.
And last, in the Pensacola News Journal, is an article that makes my heart sing, that makes me proud to live in a democracy, the article about how much our elected officials are worth, and where there money is coming from. I love it that we hold our leaders accountable, and that their wealth is (theoretically) transparent to us.
I’m a great advocate of wealth. I admire people who create wealth, who invest, who work hard for their money. The best of these people, and I mentioned Bill and Melinda Gates (above) for a reason, give back generously. Many people don’t start out rich, they start from little or nothing and build slowly slowly until they have reached a comfortable level. Sometimes, even in hard times, if you have built a strong foundation, that money just keeps multiplying, especially if it is invested with some diversity.
“It’s called the law of the harvest,” my Mormon friends told me when we were discussing how what you give comes back to you multiplied. It was so graphic, I’ve never forgotten it. There is nothing wrong with money. Money is just another tool, like a computer, or a hammer. It’s what you do with your money (tool) that makes the difference. Money is kind of like a seed, you plant and you harvest, but it is also like fertilizer – you spread it around, and amazing things happen.
Having money is a blessing, and giving it away is even more of a blessing. When you give, good things come back to you, multiplied. It’s the Law of the Harvest.
Air France Customer Service
At long last, my Mom is coming to Pensacola for a visit.
After days of to-and-fro-ing with Mom and Big Diamond, after countless visits to Expedia and Travelocity and Delta, I was able to talk with Andre’ at Air France who, once he heard I was booking for my 88 year old mother, spent an hour with me, finding flights she could handle, (not too early in the morning, not too many stops, wheelchair assists, etc.) finding first class seats and confirming them, making sure Mom would fly in comfort.
“Thank you, thank you so much” I kept babbling, as he clicked and clicked, trying to find days and flights that would work.
“It’s my job” he would say.
The very last time I thanked him, it changed.
“Well,” he said, “when you said the word ‘mother’ then I knew I could not stop until everything was perfect.”
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Air France is lucky to have him. Bravo, Andre’.
Edmonds, Washington Street Gardens
In a time where states and counties and cities and towns are cutting back, I am infinitely grateful to my little home town that they find the resources to maintain the street gardens. In the town, you find huge baskets of flowers hanging from poles along the main streets (one of which is called Main Street, in true small town fashion). These are from the street level gardens; they are so beautiful.
Nearby, two of our favorite stores are side by side:
Woo HOOO, Half Price Books is having their annual Labor Day Sale, 20% off everything in the store. Like we need more books. 😉
Why People Give
An urgent message came out today asking us to help the homeless people in Pensacola – and there are a lot of them, thanks to the warm climate. With all the rain recently, sleeping rough has been doubly rough, and it has been made worse by a sudden humidity-moisture related surge in the mosquito population.
As I talked with AdventureMan about our donation, he laughed. I was in fund-raising for a while, and was unexpectedly good at it. One thing I learned, there are a lot of ways to persuade people to donate, and then again, sometimes people will donate and you haven’t a clue as to why they felt this urge to be generous.
AdventureMan laughed; he totally got it. I used to work with a homeless, a long time ago, so I have a soft spot where they are concerned. Mosquitos also love me, and I get these horrid great but huge itchy bumps any time I am anywhere near a mosquito, AdventureMan always says he keeps me nearby because they head straight for me and ignore him.
Of course we donated. Wet homeless people and mosquitos, it was a golden combination. If you would like to donate, too, you can, through the EscaRosa Coalition on the Homeless (Working to Eliminate Homelessness). They will hold an Annual Fundraiser on Saturday September 11th from 7pm – 11pm at The Garden Center.
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