Love One Another

SOURCE:  "Building One Another" by Stanley Ott, February 14, 2012,

February 14, 2012 Vol. 11, No. 5 Love One Another
Dear Friend, Is not the essence of Valentine’s Day to affirm your love to the people in your life? When it came to the love of the Thessalonian Christians, the apostle Paul wrote, “Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other.” I Thess. 4:9*  Indeed we have been.  Take a moment and read all the ways: A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  John 13:34 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.  John 13:35 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another... Romans 13:8 Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.  1 Peter 1:22 Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love one another… 1 Peter 3:8 This is the message you heard from the beginning:  We should love one another.  1 John 3:11 And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.  1 John 3:23 Friends, let us love one another… 1 John 4:7 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  1 John 4:11 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another...  1 John 4:12 It’s difficult to miss the point!  May what Paul asks of the Thessalonians be true of us, “And in fact, you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more.” I Thessalonians 4:10
With joy- E. Stanley Ott Copyright 2012 E. Stanley Ott *Scripture from the NIV

Love Your Enemies

SOURCE: "A Victim Treats His Mugger Right" by Michael Garofalo. NPR: Morning Edition. March 28, 2008.  http://www.npr.org/2008/03/28/89164759/a-victim-treats-his-mugger-right
KEYWORDS:  beatitudes, love,

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"

Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.

"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

"The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi," Diaz says. "The kid was like, 'You know everybody here. Do you own this place?'"

"No, I just eat here a lot," Diaz says he told the teen. "He says, 'But you're even nice to the dishwasher.'"
Diaz replied, "Well, haven't you been taught you should be nice to everybody?"

"Yea, but I didn't think people actually behaved that way," the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. "He just had almost a sad face," Diaz says.

The teen couldn't answer Diaz — or he didn't want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, "Look, I guess you're going to have to pay for this bill 'cause you have my money and I can't pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I'll gladly treat you."
The teen "didn't even think about it" and returned the wallet, Diaz says. "I gave him $20 ... I figure maybe it'll help him. I don't know."

Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen's knife — "and he gave it to me."

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, "You're the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch."

"I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."

Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo.

Do I Get Free Wi-Fi?

Source:  "Ask Bigger Questions" by Keith Anderson.  http://www.churchleadership.com/leadingideas/leaddocs/2011/111130_article2.html

In June 2011, Steve Jobs made a twenty-minute presentation to the Cupertino City Council to introduce Apple’s plans for a new corporate headquarters, affectionately known as “the mothership.” This presentation caught my attention because it happened on the heels of Jobs’s big introduction of OSX Lion, iOS5, and iCloud at the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. I laughed that even Steve Jobs had to deal with local politics, and I wondered how he would perform on someone else’s much smaller stage. So I watched.

He presented the new building to the City Council with his trademark charm. He talked about the architectural significance of the building, how it would create significantly more green space, the value of staying in his hometown of Cupertino and the accompanying economic benefits. Following his presentation, one of the city council members, inquiring about the benefit to the residents, asked Jobs — the Steve Jobs, the Edison of our time, the CEO of Apple, the second largest company in the world — “Do we get free Wi-Fi?”
Jobs responded by reiterating that Apple is the largest taxpayer in Cupertino, that it attracts bright and fairly affluent people (who also pay taxes), and that they are vastly increasing the green space. He concluded, “I think we bring a lot more than free Wi-Fi.” No kidding.

The memory of this presentation and exchange has remained with me, particularly since Jobs’s death, because of the valuable lesson I took from it. Most of the time our questions are too small.

Pull Yourself Toward God

Source:  "Religion Doesn't Make People Immoral, Being Human Does, " an interview with Rabbi David Wolpe on the Slate website.

"Leona Medina, a [17^th-century] rabbi, once said very beautifully, if you were standing on the shore of a lake watching a guy pull his boat to the shore, and you were confused about mechanics and motion, you might think that he was pulling the shore to the boat. People make the same mistake when they pray. Whatever they want, they're going to move God to it. But real prayer is when you pull yourself towards God."

You Cannot...

Source:  "American Charter" by Rev. William John Henry Boetcker; 1916 (often wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln).  http://www.snopes.com/quotes/lincoln/prosperity.asp

* You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
* You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
* You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
* You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
* You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
* You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
* You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
* You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
* You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative
and independence.
* You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and
should do for themselves.

We Are Not Alone

SOURCE: "We Are Not Alone," Su Voz; Tuesday, October 18, 2011

KEYWORDS: loneliness,

 
JOHN 16: 25-36*
“You will desert me; however, I am not alone, because the Father is with me.”

Loneliness is the most desolate word in the Spanish language. It has no regard for a person’s age, race, wealth, or level of intelligence.  Albert Einstein said, “How strange to be a world-renowned figure and yet to suffer from such loneliness.”

God created us to experience intimacy and companionship with others. He declared that it was not good for the man to be alone.  Solitude is the reason that many people end up feeling empty inside.

Jesus also felt lonely and must have felt it quite deeply when His disciples abandoned him.  Nevertheless, the presence of the Father was made clear when He said, “I am not alone, because the Father is with me.”  This closeness with the Lord can be had by all who place their trust in Him and in His Word.

We can forget our feelings of loneliness by opening ourselves up to others; but even more importantly, we must open ourselves up to the Lord. He is always with us and wants us to have communion with Him at all times.

PRAYER: Lord, grant that your company might erase all feelings of loneliness in my life. Amen.

Things I Knew

SOURCE:  http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/276912/911-paul-krugman-and-15-years-worth-harsh-surprises

Jim Geraghty writes a blog over at National Review Online.  I'm not endorsing everything he has said, but I found his litany relaying the surprises of the past 15 years moving. 

Think back to about fourteen or fifteen years ago, and everything you thought you knew at that moment.

You knew no president would be so reckless that he would get caught having sex with an intern in the Oval Office.

You may have worried about your kid’s safety at school, but you knew two alienated teenagers couldn’t turn their rage into a massacre.

You “knew” that the winner of the presidential election was the candidate who got the most votes.

You knew absentee ballots get counted, whether or not the race was close or not. You knew a vote was a vote, and “dimpled chad” was the kid in your child’s kindergarten class photo.

When you looked out at the New York City skyline, you knew it would look the same the next day.

If you knew where Afghanistan was, you knew those loons beating women and blowing up Buddhas were bad news, but they were on the other side of the world and you had a lot more closer to home to worry about.

You knew the only thing being sent through the mail that could kill you came from the Unabomber. You knew that if deadly poison ever came through the mail, it wouldn’t be coming from a government scientist.

You knew a giant company like Enron with a big corporate headquarters and commercials couldn’t be a big scam. After all, serious professional economists like Paul Krugman worked for them as consultants.

You knew that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You knew that when the United States sent its troops into harm’s way, it knew the mission and how it would accomplish it.

You knew that American soldiers didn’t humiliate their prisoners for fun, and didn’t take pictures of it.

You knew that you could trust priests.

You knew that you’d never see a breast during the Super Bowl halftime show.

You knew that television news anchors checked out their sources before reporting a huge story right before an election. You knew that if an anchor got it wrong, other news media would jump all over them, and the defining mission of figuring out the truth wouldn’t be left to a bunch of no-names working in their pajamas.

You knew hurricanes could get pretty rough, but you figured every big Gulf Coast city was ready for them.

You knew that governors didn’t sleep with hookers, at least not the ones who started their careers as prosecutors busting prostitution rings.

You knew the value of your house would almost always go up each year, some years a little, some years a lot.

You knew gas prices went up and went down, but that you would probably never pay more than three bucks a gallon.

You knew not to drink the water in Mexico, but that food here in America – tomatoes, jalapenos, peanut butter, ground beef – was always safe.

You knew the Cold War was over, the days of Russian troops marching across borders and occupying parts of other countries were long gone.

You knew the markets could bounce around, but that nobody talked about them collapsing and another Depression descending upon us. Your money was safe in institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, you spent your paycheck on gadgets at Circuit City and the Sharper Image, furniture from Bombay Company, books from Borders and toys from KB Toys, and the Big Three in Detroit would always keep making cars. The last thing you would ever see would be the big guys on Wall Street going to Washington and begging the federal government for cash.

You knew that recessions usually ended within a year; they didn’t drag on, with high unemployment, year after year after year…

You figured you could pick up your copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, or the Christian Science Monitor every day until you died and never see those events in the headlines. It was about as likely as a federally-funded community group offering assistance to child prostitution rings.

The past fifteen years have been one rude awakening after another, where one unspoken assumption after another kept getting smacked around by a bipolar furious reality.

I also appreciate one of the comments listed there as well. 

Couldn't you make a list like that for any 15 year period?
Think 1930-1945 for starters....
15 years ago I knew that no nation could kill millions of people in gas chambers...

How to Manage Ideas

SOURCE: "Leadership Limerick: How to Manage Ideas" by Jeffrey Cufaude
http://www.ideaarchitects.org/2011/09/leadership-limerick-how-do-you-manage.html?m=1

"Great ideas are easily lost,
And bad ones often aren't tossed.
You need a system to rate,
and determine the right fate,
Or else you'll pay a great cost."

What It's Like to Be in Love

SOURCE:  http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/277396/what-it-s-be-love-michael-potemra
KEYWORDS:  love, Chesterton, discipleship,

On the subway, I was reading one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, “The Flying Stars,” and ran across one of those passages that make Chesterton worth the attention even of those who do not share his key theological or political views. The setting is an impromptu theatrical at a Boxing Day house party, and the boyfriend of the family’s daughter has taken charge of the entertainment:

He was supposed to be the clown, but he was really almost everything else, the author (so far as there was an author), the prompter, the scene-painter, the scene-shifter, and, above all, the orchestra. . . . Commonly he was a clever man, and he was inspired tonight with a wild omniscience, a folly wiser than the world, that which comes to a young man who has seen for an instant a particular expression on a particular face.

Honestly, this passage brought tears to my eyes, even though I had read the story more than once before — simply because it made real, emotionally, the way being in love transforms not only one’s view of the love-object, but also of oneself and of the whole world. To the person in love, the whole world seems to come into a brighter and clearer focus, and inspires a sense of omni-competence: Anything I didn’t do before, out of laziness or lack of motivation, I am now able to do, and want to do.

Chesterton does not theologize this passage, but I can’t help myself. St. John tells us that “God is love” — and is there not, in His attitude toward His creatures, the same sort of amour fou that the young man is possessed by in the story? And isn’t mysticism nothing but a glimpse, an inkling, a reflection, of precisely that sort of love? The perspective love brings is more powerful than that of pure reason. This is why many people over the past couple of centuries have objected to the word “Logos” to characterize God, and sought to de-Hellenize theology — purify it of Greek philosophical concepts — to get rid of the word. They intuit, correctly, that God is not “Word” in the sense of Professor Dryasdust and the cold syllogisms of purely human reason; they get the sense, in reading the works of too many theologians, that the latter have set many all-too-human limits on God. (This can be expressed as: “God is capable of more things than the volumes of Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, and the canon lawyers of various denominations might be willing to permit Him.” But who could put it better than Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”)

But “Logos” is quite appropriate if it’s understood in a broader way, to mean a reason deeper than ours, a reason not limited to the rules elaborated by our thinkers — a reason like that of the man in the story, with his “folly wiser than the world.” What looks like “folly to the Greeks,” a stumbling block to human reason, is, many of us believe, the Deepest Reason of all.

The View From Above

Source:  "Looking Down from the Sky"; Engines of our Ingenuity, No. 1729.  http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1729.htm
Keyword:  aloof, abstraction, reductionism

When human flight came to be, suddenly there was a new way of looking at the world.  Artists and then cameras took birds-eye views of the landscape. 

Two of the many people who talked about the new aerial perspective were Charles Lindbergh and the radical architect Le Corbusier. For Le Corbusier, the view from above made the earth below into an abstraction. In 1935, he wrote.

The bird's eye view ... now sees in substance what the mind formerly could only subjectively conceive.

He particularly disliked what he saw of cities from above. He went on to make this chilling remark:

Cities must be extricated from their misery, come what may. Whole quarters of them must be destroyed and new cities built.

Then we see the sterile geometrical city layouts he proposed as replacements. Just as Mussolini and Hitler took power, Le Corbusier was gravitating into a like-minded form of technocratic fascism.
The young Lindbergh was also accused of pro-fascist leanings. However, at the end of long and complex life, he was still struggling to get it right. In his last book, published after he died, he recalls visiting an island off the Brittany coast, in 1938. First, he seems to echo Le Corbusier. He says:

... when I was flying from America to Europe [I] looked down on the Atlantic and wondered what shapes and contours were masked by the sameness of its surface. ... the sea maintained its dignified aloofness.

But now, walking the beach below, his tone changes:

At the edge of [the sea], each fastly ebbing tide opened the ocean's threshold, let you step into a strange and foreign realm. Fish, camouflaged by weeds, hung motionless in crystal pools. Green, protoplasmic masses lay inertly on the stones. A tentacle from a small squid flashed out.

Lindbergh had been a barnstormer, a hero, an inventor, and a WW-II combat pilot. He'd had seen it all from above. An older Lindbergh understands how that elevated perspective can deceive any of us.
We engineers live by abstracting reality into manageable parcels. But we know nothing if we disconnect from the hard earth of messy detail. The "dignified aloofness" of the long view is lovely, but only because it is constructed from the rich organic clutter contained within it.

 Abstraction and reductionism often leaves out life.  It is important to live within the messiness of real life.  The faith calls us not simply to the mountaintop but also to the life below.