Spring Break

The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life. - Job 33:4

So what did you do with your Spring Break, Mr. Moe? The gift of several days free time is an awesome gift that brings with it awesome responsibility. I cannot help but judge myself for how well I spend such free time. I have wasted enough of it to know that doing so leaves me feeling empty, spent, angry, and cheated all at the same time. “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of,” so says the old American sage, Ben Franklin.

Some of my time was commandeered by forces outside of my control. There were daily visits to the hospital as my mom struggled through some surgery. I dare not bear resentment over the constraints of obligations bearing upon my time for no man is an island unto himself. Only the totally self-consumed are so and condemn themselves to shriveling souls that hoard their time like secret gold. And so, there were still duties to perform which tested whether or not I viewed my time as strictly my own. Any and all vacations should start there: a living gift placed upon the altar and precious all the more when it is given back in whole or part. There is nothing like gratitude to awaken the senses.

With the remainder (and there was plenty), I purposely set about to give refreshment to body, soul, and spirit for each have needs unique unto their own. For the body, I elected replanting a number of dead shrubs about the house and mulching them accordingly. Not very glamorous, I admit, yet there is a certain amount of satisfaction from turning the earth, restoring nature, and pure common labor. It did please others and could have been considered one of the above obligations, yet my body felt refreshed from working it so, and I rejoiced for having the strength to accomplish these mundane tasks. Later in the week, I broke free of all obligations and hiked up the Rich Mountain Loop Trail above Cades Cove. My lungs and legs strained under the load of pack and winter fat as I slowly climbed the miles up to a lofty campsite. My spirit was refreshed as well by luxuriously lunching while laying in a bed of leaves with my face to the warming sun. No expensive restaurant was ever so rich as that hillside spot in a quiet wood. And then to sit around a dying fire while the moon rose to bathe our little company in its magic light was pure joy.

For the soul, my wife and I indulged ourselves in some hours of kid-in-the-candy-shop pure fun at the Friends of the Library Book Sale. It was the last day and books were going for $5 a box. We poured over hundreds and hundreds of books rejoicing each time we found a “keeper.” We finally left with five boxfuls feeling like lottery winners. The joy continues as we have been able to delve into our new treasures and feed upon stories taking us to far places and times and consider whole new worlds of ideas.

It is hard to tell where the soul ends and the spirit begins. Some would laugh and say it foolish to think them different. Of little matter, I guess, but the Easter Season enriched my break as indeed it always used to before our calendar keepers turned so secular. A special Maundy Thursday service left us reeling from the beauty of such sweet sacrifice. And this, followed by the smashing power of the resurrection. Rich!

There were other things too, a couple of movies, catching up on correspondence and bills, a couple of lazy morning breakfasts, some family dinner parties, several good bike rides, three birthdays, sadly a couple of funerals, a car washing, the stopping of a leaky faucet, and lunch with some friends. In the end, no regrets; no looking back on wasted days. I take it as the proof of loving life; most satisfactory.

hike report 3/24/08

Hate to put it to you this way but you missed it.

Friend Caleb and I ventured up the Rich Mountain Loop Trail on Friday amidst glorious sunshine and balmy temperatures. There was sufficient exercise going the long way to #6 campsite and plenty of views of both Cades and Tuckaleechy (sp) Coves. We got in early enough to do some reading before dinner. Plenty of firewood and also some good company from Georgia. Some folks on the trail just shy of the campsite said a bobcat had just crossed the trail scowling at them. A pair of does wandered our campsite in the morning looking for salty tidbits. The night sky was gorgeous with a full moon bathing our site. Air was breezy but warm through the night. Sat. was perfection with warm and sunny weather all the way home. Only bummer was that the Lazy Daze Campground ice cream machine is not up and running until Apr. 15.

This trip was about next to perfection as it gets.

Hope to see you next trip.

Poisonous Roots

If there was one thing that Francis Schaeffer tried to teach us, it was that ideas have consequences. It was a short step from Rousseau’s desire to follow nature to the Marquis de Sade and his treatment of women because nature had made men the stronger of the sexes. After Darwin burst his idea of survival of the fittest upon the world, many quickly bent it to their purposes and thereby justified all sorts of inhuman treatment of their fellow man. And when one convinces himself that he speaks for the proletariat, the suppressed masses of the world, no crime becomes unthinkable.

Schaeffer was quixotically tilting against powerful windmills, however, for his message matured just as the West was in the process of dumping the very idea that truth existed in a relativistic, post-modern fit of righteous self-cleansing. Tolerance replaced truth as the supreme virtue. All would have lived happily ever after except for the inconvenient truth of 9-11. We were rudely shown that there are still some very powerful and dangerous ideas running amok out there for which many would gladly sacrifice their lives in balls of flaming death falling from the skies.

It should be no surprise that our leaders and the elite of our society seem powerless and ill-equipped to deal with this threat. They were raised on the pabulum of tolerance as virtue and can’t understand why all men of reason do not respond in kind. But fight they must, and so they have committed us to a war of weapons and treasure with some lip service given to freedom and democracy. But we are up against a people that are interested in neither freedom nor democracy. There is not enough money to buy them nor can we force them to be free, a very un-democratic action, indeed.

There is a missing component in this war, and it is that of ideology. Compare our behavior in Iraq with that of our forces in Japan at the end of WWII. Gen. MacArthur entered Japan with near dictatorial powers and with a clear vision for going down in history not as a great general but as someone who brought “the solace and hope and faith of Christian morals” to the land of a vanquished foe. Japan was a tradition-directed culture where the individual was subsumed into a collective mindset not seen in the West since the middle ages. The Emperor was divine, women were inferior beings, peasants were sharecroppers shackled to the land, and Shintoism promoted martial virtues and the inferiority of other races. There were no civil rights or liberties and power was wielded by the gumbatsu (militarists) and the zaibatsu (11 industrial families). Japan was a totalitarian society more akin to ancient Sparta than any modern nation.

MacArthur suspended the Emperor’s functions, brought freedom of the press, instituted civil liberties, released all political prisoners, demanded women’s suffrage, and informed the public of Japan’s war crimes. Most importantly, he sought to turn their idolatry for the warrior class into hatred and contempt by removing all militaristic propaganda from school textbooks. He established academic freedom, forbid all discrimination, and opened schools to women. In a new constitution he virtually dictated, the armed forces were abolished and war was renounced as a sovereign right of the nation. Dozens of other drastic changes were made, far too many to mention here.

As a result of his cultural meddling, the national income surpassed pre-war levels in just 5 years, 90% of land ended up in the hands of people who farmed it, cholera was wiped out, and the life expectancy of men increased by 8 years and women 14 years. Most importantly, the Shinto, militaristic, and totalitarian mindset disappeared. Eight years after VJ Day, Theodor Geisel (“Dr. Seuss”) visited Japan and conducted an extensive survey of Japanese children who were encouraged to draw pictures of what they wanted to become. Every profession was noted from doctors to wrestlers, but only one child drew a soldier. And he wanted to become a MacArthur.

Contrast this to our war in Iraq which targets Al Qaeda fighters but not the philosophy and mentality that propels them. For every one we kill, there may be two or three willing to take their place. Our troops have to wind their way through dangerous streets while mosque loudspeakers boom forth anti-American tirades over the heads of those sent there to protect them. We dare not enter a mosque where they are busy inculcating another generation with the poison of anti-Israel venom and Arab imperialism through Jihad. Terrorism is not a deviant of misplaced Islamic fundamentalism. It is part and parcel of Jihad which is clearly understood in the Arab world as holy war, not an internal struggle.

While Christianity suffered from the hands of extremists in the middle-ages, witch burning and the inquisition were doomed from the start because they were so against the grain of Christ’s teaching. These practices pale against the crimes of Jihad today which sanctions the killing of infidels and glorifies the assassins with sainthood: all this very clearly consistent with the teachings and practices of Islam’s first and greatest prophet.

The main goal of much of Arab education is to instill a rabid commitment to destroy Israel. Everything from nursery rhymes to textbooks teaches children about Jews being pigs, dogs, and devils out to steal their land. “May God bless us with shahada (martyrdom)” is their prayer. A totalitarian control grips their lives with fear used to direct blind vengeance against the Jew and the forces of modernism that come from the West. The Muslim faith is assured through fear, shame, intimidation, imprisonment, or death. Women lead second class lives, fatalism is endemic to the culture, personal responsibility is a foreign concept, and lying to protect family or culture from outsiders is considered a virtue. Preserving family honor is more important than happiness or a healthy life. Hate speech pervades Arab TV and the mosques. Contrary to common perception, Islamic radicalism is not a product of ignorance and poverty even though Arab lands boast some of the highest illiteracy rates in the world. The majority of the radicals are coming out of the upper classes and medical schools. These zealots are simply acting out what they have been taught from childhood: kill infidels, Americans, Jews, and Christians and gain the rewards and honors for those who die in Jihad.

Unfortunately, our state department does not want to get involved in ideological warfare. They have been educated in America where we do not want to make judgments involving cultures or religions. Our president has called Islam a “religion of peace” and said that he worships the same god as they; two statements which are greeted with incredulous unbelief in the Arab world as hopelessly naive. But in this wishful thinking, he is well at home among the campuses of America where non-judgmental relativism reigns.

We are caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma. We have engaged the most radical believers of Islam in armed conflict but do not have the heart or conviction to tell them that they embrace a false and horribly self-destructive world view. Without curing the cause, we are condemned to continue the conflict with no end in sight. As someone has said, “We have the means to destroy them but not the will. They have the will to destroy us but not the means.” The possession of those means, however, is only a matter of time.

The answer is not to destroy them first. We can, however, address the cultural imbalance that exists between us and the Arab world. We can demand access for access, freedom for freedom as the price of doing business with the Western world. We grant them religious freedom here. It should be matched by equal freedom within their nations. My friends can’t even take their personal Bibles with them when traveling to Saudi Arabia. For every mosque built in America, they need to permit the building of churches in Mecca and around the Arab world. If American wealth and blood are being spilt to renew Afghanistan, we should insist that they guarantee Christian believers the right to life and limb and make freedom of religion a foundation of their law.

Secondly, we need to challenge Islamic clerics and intellectuals to save Islam through reform. They will either reform it or risk starting WWIII. The Jihad needs to be renounced for the relic of the middle-ages that it is. On that point of belief we could easily discover who our friends are in the Islamic world. Without that renunciation, we face an intransigent foe. If Islam is the religion of peace promoting understanding as many of them say, it needs to be taught to their own children. That is the proof we need.

MacArthur realized we needed to change Japanese culture from the ground up and the ideas it was built upon; not just defeat them in battle. Without that change, the death dealing pilots of 9-11 could just as well have been the descendants of the kamikaze suicide bombers of old. Ideas do have consequences.


Sources: American Caesar, William Manchester, Little, Brown and Co, 1978.
Now They Call Me Infidel, Nonie Darwish, Sentinel, The Penguin Group, 2006.

Prosperity

"By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches and honor and life.” –Pro. 22:4

Last week I left you with a question to ponder: what does the inclination of humans to forget God in the midst of prosperity have to do with families and children? One answer can be found in a book entitled, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids (HarperCollins) written by Madeline Levine, a practicing psychologist in Northern California. Her target study group were families enjoying 6 figure incomes, but what she learned is applicable to all. She discovered that: a) 30 to 40 % of affluent teens experience significant emotional problems (3 times the national average), b) depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse and psychosomatic disorders are higher among affluent teens than among teens in any other socioeconomic group, and c) affluent kids feel less close to their parents than any other group of teens. Levine concluded that these parents are trying to fill their children with the wrong things – material goods, super achievement, worldly success, and status. At the same time, the importance of values, character, unconditional love, and a work ethic are neglected or short-changed.

Betsy Hart, who reviewed the book (News-Sent. 1-26-08), argues that “too many of our kids have been abandoned to a secular culture and have little or no transcendent spiritual values being imparted to them.”Both highlight the need for balancing the need for academic achievement with the experience of success and satisfaction that comes from being a contributing member of the family group and acquiring a strong work ethic. The inference is that instead of a steady diet of soccer, violin lessons, ballet, and little league all on top of honor-roll level homework, there should first be a substantial portion of taking out the garbage, digging flower beds, washing dogs, vacuuming under furniture, and mowing lawns. From these things, they learn the value of good deeds, the ability to cooperate and be a contributing member of a group, and the accumulation of daily living skills.

There was a day when I did not look so kindly on those ideals. My experience growing up on a farm included any number of daily chores many of which I found highly odious. But we knew that our living was directly tied to the strength of Dad’s back and Mom’s arms. To not assist them would be nothing short of criminal. And when the barn was filled with hay at the end of a summer and when the corn cribs bulged, there was a sense of pride, satisfaction, and security that touched even my often dulled, teen-aged mind. I also learned how adversity could be overcome every time the decrepit old, family hay-baler broke down in the middle of the field. Dad found a way to fix it even if it took the rest of the day and several trips to town. We learned to endure adversity when the market prices plummeted. And we learned to share the joys of fresh strawberries in season topped with mountains of whipped cream from the milk of our own cow, the same cow I herded up from the fields every day after school.

I am always thrilled when I see our CFC families working together as teams, where each child lends a hand in some capacity or another. It is a valuable part of their education. Levine backs you up on this but also stresses letting kids work through frustrations and adversity instead of us constantly solving all their problems for them. Add to this a lesson in letting them know that parents have needs, too. But above all, love the kids you have, not the ones you are trying to create. In so doing, we can avoid the traps created by excessive prosperity. No, affluent kids do not have it all. And we certainly do not need to emulate their dysfunctions. Work, teamwork, affection, life skills, adversity, and eternal values are time tested ways to remove the poison from the prosperity in which we stand knee-deep.