Good News

Christians are always talking about the Good News, and about preaching it and sharing it. But as with anything, eventually terms wear out and names start to become meaningless. The “Good News” may be a term that many of my readers are familiar with but one that has perhaps lost the excitement it once had. And it may be a term that many of my readers have never heard before. So I am attempting to reframe—What is the Good News? What is being celebrated? What is God telling us?

He is telling us that finally, finally, the work He began at the creation of the world can continue. Finally, the gap between us and Him can be closed. Finally, He can redeem us and we can be part of His plan to make the world as it should be.

There are many things in this world that we look at and think, “This isn’t the way things should be.” There are wars and famines and floods, people dying, old and young alike, children sick, families going hungry, people living without shelter. Our thoughts are true: This isn’t how the world should be.

But this is what we choose, unwittingly or otherwise. We choose our way instead of God’s, demand our right to do what we want. We decide that we want to go our own way and be responsible to ourselves alone. And we’ve walked away from God. But there’s this “Good News”. What’s changed?

Jesus lived and died. That is a historical fact, but Christians differ from the rest of the world because we believe He didn’t stay dead. What an amazing thought that is. For someone to die and come back to life? Impossible. But what if we were to accept that this is true? What does that mean?

Jesus defeated death.

The biggest thing that feels wrong and wasteful to us has been reversed.

“The wages of sin is death,” so says the Bible. We have all done wrong things and therefore, we all die. “But,” it continues, “the gift of God is eternal life.” Jesus did nothing wrong. But He chose to die and to use His purity to take on the sins of the world. He had no debt to pay, so His death paid for the debts of us all. And now we are the good news. We are redeemed to God. We are now a part of His work to redeem the world and make it the way it is supposed to be.

It isn’t an easy step to take, I admit, for He asks us to give up everything that we have taken. He asks us to submit once again to Him, to again do things the way that He wants and to again live our lives according to His plan.

But through this, even though we may not see it in this lifetime, we can see and live in the world God intended for us to live in, with things the way God intended for them to be.

Following Jesus is difficult. But there is joy and hope and renewal. Redemption is the process of remaking. Something old made new again, something broken made whole. He asks all, He gives all.

This truly is Good News.

Ask the Experts

So I know that I have a lot of Med, Nursing, Biology, Health, Kinesiology, etc. students who read this blog, and I have a question for you:

What effect does sugar and/or chocolate have on mood? I have the vaguest layman’s idea of it, but I’m curious about the technical, chemical process, and/or studies that have been done, and/or controversies about it . Please still weigh in, even if someone’s said it before. I want to hear all of your opinions and learning!

And don’t tell me to Google it (you tech-savvy bunch!). I want to hear what you have to say

A new direction?

It has been a long time since I’ve posted regularly. I’ve had at least one person complain to me of my blog silence. (To that person: Twitter, man, I’m telling ya!) But I think in part, my thoughts have become a little more scattered (you know, considering the incredibly short style I’ve adopted because of Twitter), but in a larger part, I think it’s time to shift this blog in a new direction, or at the very least, refresh it. So I’m curious: what do you readers want to see more of?

Do you want to see more results of the recipes I’m trying?

Should I post more photo-diary entries?

Would you be interested in following a serial story written by moi (and in helping me out when I get writer’s block)?

Would you like to hear more of my thoughts/perspectives on politics, literature, dance, love/marriage, God/Jesus/Christianity/spirituality, etc?

Do you want more links/random clippings from what I’m reading?

More stories about my day?

I’ve enjoyed writing for you for the past three years, and hearing your opinions and reading your blogs, and I hope the direction I will be taking this blog in the future is one that you will be interested in reading.

Can a sound creak?

These are the kinds of questions that plague an author.

I wrote that a door opened “with an old, creaking sound”. Is it “creaking sound” or is it just “creak”? Can I say, “with an old creak”? The creak isn’t old, so that doesn’t make sense. But the first sentence (“with an old, creaking sound”) doesn’t make sense, because it isn’t the sound that creaks: it’s the door. The door opens with a sound that sounds old and that creaks, but I can’t say that the door opened with a sound that sounded old and sounded creaky (or even that it opened and sounded old and creaky…). That is just poor sentence construction, and not even the least bit creative or artistic. It says what I want it to say, but the reader gets so distracted in my myriad uses of the word “sound” that the rest is lost.

Seriously, can I say that a sound creaked? Any alternative wordings?

Haha, and now you will all get on swimmingly if you ever end up reading this story until you hit that sentence about this darn door. And then you all be so distracted with trying to rework the sentence now that you know and understand the context that you will wind up stuck at chapter one, never able to resolve this sentence, and therefore never able to move on from it. Perhaps that would be better. You would have all the enjoyment of reading a novel by Yours Truly, and I would never have to write beyond the sentence of the creaking door. And henceforward, that is what that sentence shall be known as. Perhaps I will introduce an entirely new and unrelated title strictly for this section of the story: “The Sentence of the Creaking Door” and then continue. It sounds very epic, dontcha think?

…

And the above paragraph is the reason why writers rarely discuss (except with other writers) what is going through their minds during the story-crafting process. It is also why I shall end this post here.

But seriously, any thoughts about my Sentence?

It’s not my fault

I was speaking with a friend of mine the other night about the topic of personal responsibility. Specifically, we were talking about how North American society seems to have decided to give up on personal responsibility. No where am I presented with more blatant proof than on the schoolyard.

Incidents happen on fairly regular basis at a school. By “incident”, I mean arguments between children, name-calling, pushing, hitting, exclusion, gaining up on each other, yelling at each other, etc. During any given lunch monitor duty, I have at least one, but usually several more, such incidents to deal with. Children come to me complaining that so-and-so called them a name, hit them, pushed them, won’t play with them, won’t stop following them, won’t leave them alone, has stopped talking to them and on it goes. In those scenarios, I can usually tell pretty quickly who is the instigator and who is the victim. I can also usually tell when it is a case of a fall-out between friends and when it is a matter of “enemies” (as great as enemies can be in elementary school) getting into each others’ space. But it doesn’t matter what the incident is, and it doesn’t matter what kind of clash it is, for uniformly, when I am being told what happened, it is always the other person’s fault.

“But he said you hit him. Is that true?” I ask.

“Well, but he was calling me a name!” Bobby will say.

“That’s because you wouldn’t stop following me!” Bobby’s former friend, Teddy, will say.

“You didn’t have to call me that name!” Bobby will protest.

“And then he hit me,” Teddy repeats, trying again to tell me what happened. “And it wasn’t fair, because I didn’t do anything to him.”

“He called me a name!” Bobby will add. “And all I was doing was trying to play with him, because he said he would play with me this recess!”

“I didn’t want to play this recess!” Teddy will say. “Tell him to stop following me!”

“Tell him to stop calling me names!”

I usually try to cut through the argument before this point is reached.

“Guys!” I say. “I don’t want to hear it. It’s really simple. Bobby, I don’t want to hear again that you were hitting someone–”

Bobby will try to protest.

“And Teddy,” I will interrupt before Bobby has a chance to speak. “Don’t call him names.”

Teddy will usually mumble something like an agreement.

“I need you guys to give each other space this recess. Don’t go near each other–”

Protests usually erupt at this point.

“He was the one coming near me!” Teddy will cry, at the same time that Bobby says, “If he hadn’t [some obscure and heretofore unmentioned offense here], I wouldn’t have had to!”

“Guys, seriously,” I say. “Just give each other space. You don’t go near Teddy, and Teddy, you don’t go near Bobby. I don’t want to hear anything more about anyone hitting someone or calling someone names. Understood?”

By this point, usually there is some level of begrudged agreement.

I’m sure that you’ve caught this, but not once did either child admit that they had done something. They didn’t deny having done it, but they never admitted it, and the implication in their words was that they never would have done it, if the other person hadn’t done something first. There is no indication that they accept that what they have done is wrong, and no indication that they realize they can control their own actions, or, regardless of what the other person does to them, that they can avoid escalating the situation simply by choosing to do what is right.

Oh, do kids ever have a handle on justice and fairness. Oh, do they ever. But it is always justice for themselves and fairness in their own lives.

I have accepted that this is normal for kids. In psychology, there is whole stage of development devoted to the time when children finally learn to think about things from another’s perspective. Rather than automatically assuming that the way they think is the way everyone else thinks, children begin learning that people see things from very different perspectives, but until they have a very firm grasp on this (and even sometimes long after this point is reached), they still think about things primarily as how they apply to themselves. And that’s fair. But our job as adults is to teach them how to consider other people. Our job as adults is to teach them how to take responsibility for their own actions. Our job as adults is to teach them how to make good choices.

We need to get there. We need to be teaching our kids this. Imagine what our society will look like when no one is willing to stand up and take responsibility for what they’ve done. Instead of having only the occasional person refuse to admit when they’re wrong, or refusing to apologize, or blaming everyone and everything else for what has happened, it would be everywhere. Oh I shudder to think of the chaos that would be.

What do you think about all of this?

Teaching: Day Two

Scene: The playground at lunch recess

Characters: Myself (teacher’s assistant and lunch monitor), Girl A, Girl B

Girl A and B skip up towards myself

Girl A: Teacher, can we walk with you?

Me: Sure! What are your names?

(They tell me)

Me: What grade are you in?

Girl A: Grade one

Me: What kinds of things are you learning right now?

Girl B: We’re learning about money.

Me: Like counting it and stuff?

Girl A: Yea… (pause) Do you have a son?

Me: (in that mock surprise voice that is true surprise, but trying to pass itself off as teasing) A son? No! Do I look old enough to have a son?

I’ve been asked the question before, but the usual silly giggles as the asker realizes that, no, in fact, I do not look old enough to have a son, do not come; instead they look at me with wide, honest eyes and say,

“Yes.”

“I do?”

And then my internal voice kicks in: You’re twenty-two, hun.

“Oh.”

I look old enough to have kids… huh. That’s a weird thought to get used to.

Open DNS?

I wonder, am I the only one this happens to? Occasionally, it will take awhile to connect to a website (www.google.com, mail.google.com, www.facebook.com, etc), but instead of showing an “unable to connect” page, this will pop up.

I’ve done a Google search and found what I believe to be their homepage. I clicked on the “How it Works” link, and I got this description:

OpenDNS is the world’s most intelligent DNS service. Our global network and our software work together symbiotically to offer a set of features custom-tailored to you, without requiring you to buy any hardware or install any software.

This is followed by a diagram with arrows pointing from a URL to Open DNS to an image of a website, and the text beneath the image reads:

The URLs you type are translated into computer-readable numbers that take you to websites.

Well, that’s… helpful…

It seems to be a lot of endorsement for something that, to me anyway, looks kind of superfluous. Am I completely missing the point? Anyone care to shed some light on the subject? And most importantly, how do I get it to stop hijacking my browser when it takes too long to connect?