Putting Things Together

This spring I’ve been amazed at how my son and my remodeler have put things together. Both are artists and craftsmen.

Zach is a music composition major at Drury University. At a recital in May, students performed two pieces he had created. It amazed me that a son of mine has such a musical gift. I can play notes on a trumpet and carry a tune, but how can he put together a score featuring piccolos, vibraphone, celesta and glockenspiel? Then do another composition incorporating flutes, clarinet, violins, guitar, cellos and double bass. It’s beyond me how his mind works like that. Indeed it’s God’s gift.

Equally impressive is the job that Melvin Hopke is doing at my house. How he can knock out a linen closet, toilet and shower and make hallways that connect exactly to the new addition. How carpenters, roofers, electricians, plumbers, drywallers can come in one after the other and with precision create a new living space with great precision. That’s something incomprehensible to my non-mechanical mind.

Of course some people have told me they have no aptitude for writing. That’s one of the few artistic endeavors that comes naturally to me. If God hadn’t granted that gift, I don’t know what I would be doing.

Marketing Savvy

I must hand it to Ruby Tuesday’s. A couple of years ago, just as the economy began to tank, the mid-level-price restaurant chain began an aggressive coupon campaign to get customers in the door in order to stay in business. The approach has worked. Whenever my wife and I dine there, which is once or twice a month, the place is nearly full. That wasn’t the case in early 2008.

Ruby’s has been sending me $10 coupons for the past couple of years. Essentially a couple dining out can get one full-course meal for free, or nearly free. The coupons have come in the local and national newspapers, direct mail and e-mail. The saturation marketing strategy has worked. Customers, especially middle-aged diners like me, love a bargain.

Kohl’s is another company that has adopted the strategy, blitzing my computer and mailbox with too-good-to-miss offers on shoes, suitcases, dinnerware and clothes. Other corporations would be wise to follow the plan of Ruby’s and Kohl’s if they want to stay in business.

The Obama Haters

Seeing the intensifying vitriol aimed at President Obama on the Internet grieves me. Unfortunately, much of the loathing comes from the keyboard of Christians, who, according to Jesus, are supposed to love their neighbors — and their enemies. The Apostle Paul also admonishes Christians in Scripture to pray for their government leaders.

I lived through all this enemy camp stuff in the 1990s during Bill Clinton’s presidency, but the presence of the Web has only ratcheted up the hatemongers. I admit I’m not fond of Obama’s abortion and gay-rights policies. But for the Christian, the answer is prayer, not verbal broadsides.

I’m talking about people who intentionally spread lies, such as Obama is a Muslim or that he canceled the National Day of Prayer. Such information, repeated without bothering to check the facts, only makes Christians look ignorant.

But the visuals are worse: People who put Obama’s picture with a slash through it, a “Nobama” meter declaring that there are only 1,000 more days until the president is out of office.

Such a fomenting environment reminds me of the South in 1963. John F. Kennedy had a lot of people who hated him. He went to Dallas to try to reverse some of that. I pray all the Obama bashing isn’t giving rise to such a climate again.

I hope Christians will stop all the incivility and disrespect that has become commonplace in politics. We’re supposed to be part of the solution, not the problem.

Without a Prayer?

Today, the first Thursday in May, is officially the National Day of Prayer. The occasion is marked in many communities by a breakfast in which a Christian speaker gives a talk before local Christians and local government officials.

Setting aside a day to pray has been a tradition in the United States since 1952. The communist scare of the 1950s inspired Congress to not only declare a day of prayer but to insert “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and “in God we trust” to appear on paper currency.

That may have made Americans feel safe from the atheists back then, but increasingly non-Christians are vocal about any government sponsorship of religion. A couple of weeks ago, federal judge Barbara Crabb of Madison, Wis., ruled that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional.

Various Christians went apoplectic, believing such action surely foreshadowed the end of the world. I tend to see things differently. Why do we want the government to sanction a day of prayer once a year? Hasn’t it become spiritual window dressing, void of any real meaning? Are we so insecure in our faith that we need the government to tell is it’s a worthy activity?

I’m all for prayer, but why are churchgoers so interested in the state approving it? That seems backwards to me. The Bible repeatedly tells us we are to be different from the world, not cozying up to it. Isn’t this how Christianity got off track under Constantine?

The problem with defending prayer in official public settings is that it’s not really constitutional. In our multicultural society, can there really be a meaningful prayer to God in the name of Jesus Christ? Prayers uttered under the auspices of government have to be so inoffensive they really don’t have power.

How about if we pray to God in our churches and in our homes all the time. That way the petitions actually might be more effective. We won’t get the smug feeling that the government is patting us on the head. That’s a good thing.

The Fallen World

I cringe whenever I read some do-gooder express hope that we will wipe out hunger, disease or crime because of some technological or medical advance.

As a journalist for nearly 30 years, I’ve seen way too much depravity to view the future through rose-colored glasses. When I compare the world now to that of my childhood, there’s no question that evil has taken a great leap forward.

The world will never overcome evil because the heart of humans is wicked. Thank God for all the benevolent programs around to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and clothe the naked. But the fact remains that, overall, we’re regressing in the way we act toward our fellow human beings.

In reality, selfishness, greed and mistreatment of others is rampant. Sexual, physical and emotional abuse is at epidemic proportions around the globe in various forms. The warlord would rather hijack donated food and sell it for a profit than to see starving children eat it. The drug dealer wants to keep users from getting well. The sex trafficker abducts young women and robs them of their purity and souls.

The church is the antidote to this coarsening and exploitation. But make no mistake: the opposition is on a roll.

A Relatively New Experience

Last Saturday my Aunt Mary was buried after succumbing quickly to cancer. Although she had lived in California nearly all my life, the burial took place in Springfield, Mo., where she grew up and where I now live.

I hardly knew anybody at the funeral except my Uncle Harold, my dad’s youngest brother and Mary’s husband of 66 years. Uncle Ralph, the only other of five sons to survive, also was there, pictured on the far right, next to Harold.

When I got to the cemetery I saw Harold and Ralph talking to a couple I didn’t know. It turns out this was my first cousin Mary, Ralph’s only child, and her husband Gary. Mary’s mother died when she was three, the year after my birth. At age 52, I had never met my cousin from Virginia.

That seemed odd, because I visit with her dad every year or two. And I’ve spent time with all four of Harold’s sons, even though they all live on the West Coast. But cousin Mary’s and my paths had never crossed. In the few moments we had together, we discovered we both have been married 32 years and have three sons in their 20s.

After the service we said goodbye. Mary and Gary soon flew back home. The brief experience of meeting a long-lost cousin left me yearning to find out more.
Mary invited my wife and me to visit them and we urged them to come spend time with us. I hope it doesn’t take another half century to get better acquainted.

Save Me from Callous Remarks

Sitting at a gate waiting for my connecting plane last week in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport I couldn’t help but hearing a disturbing conversation between a couple of other passengers. A white woman in her 60s loudly moaned to a white man in his 60s about the futility of Obamacare and how much she hates the president.

It became apparent, in listening to her babble on, that her real target for wrath is anyone who doesn’t work as hard as she does. The irate female, a Tennessee nurse, told of how she had assisted in a surgery of a 15-year-old boy who had been shot by a police officer after a run-in with the law. She matter-of-factly mentioned that, because the intubation tube had been erroneously inserted into the boy’s lung instead of stomach, it left him brain dead.

That medical mistake didn’t upset this woman. No, she lamented that the boy’s parents had wrangled from the hospital and insurers not only a settlement for lifetime care but the loss of $10 million in potential lifetime earnings.

“You know that obese kid was just going to keep getting into trouble,” she declared. “He would have been dead by 18 anyway.”

I wanted to go engage the woman in conversation, but I figured I wouldn’t change her opinions on the insurance industry, non-whites or chubby kids. I just hope before I go off on some group of people I stop to check that my attitude isn’t so callous. No matter how worthless a life may seem to me, everyone has value in God’s eyes. There can’t be a dollar value placed on the loss of that life.