Reminders of our purpose

A friend of mine called me from an airport in I think, Detroit today while she was on her way to PA, asking me to help her find something on the internet so she could work on her annual report for this year while she waited for her plane. As I wa looking it up on the internet, I quickly learned that the piece of writing she was looking for, referred to as the Paradoxical Commandments by Kent M. Keith, was something I had come across for the first time during one of my summers at camp. One of my fellow staffers had read it as part of a devotion one day. It reads as follows:

The Paradoxical Commandments by Dr. Kent M. Keith

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

They are thought provoking statements - and particularly thought provoking for me - I used them as a devotion that I gave while sitting in the lounge of the church I work at today - interviewing for my position. The words still stick in my head - I can even see the little blue piece of paper they were typed on when I saw them the first time. Along with the commandments, I also used another piece for my devotion - an entry from My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers entitled 'Missionary Munitions.' It reads:

"Ministering as opportunity surrounds us. This does not mean selecting our surroundings, it means being very selectly God's in any haphazard surroundings which He engineers for us. The characteristics we manifest in our immediate surroundings are indications of what we will be like in other surroundings.

The things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this is an indication that it takes all God's power in me to do the most commonplace things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be done.

'I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done to you.' Watch the kind of people God brings around you , and you will be humiliated to find that this is His way of revealing to you the kind of person you have been to Him . Now, He says, exhibit to that one exactly what I have shown to you.

'Oh,' you say, 'I will do all that when I get out into the foreign field.' To talk in this way is like tyring to produce the munition of war in the trenches--you will be killed while you are doing it.

We have to go the 'second mile' with God. Some of us get played out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we cannot see the way, and we say--'I will wait till I get nearer the big crisis.' If we do not do the runnig steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis."

This is a calling. Now, I felt connections with this while I was interviewing - I guess, to me in a way, youth ministry is a mission field - just one of a different sort. Rather than bringing people across gaps of language and culture and other divisions of time and location, we are bringing them across an age barrier from youth to adulthood, or even from youth to adolescence (and does, interestingly enough, often include bits and pieces of the culture and language - but in different ways).

Do As I Say, Not As I Do...

We are a nation of hypocrites. Now, before you get defensive - think - that doesn't mean that I don't think anyone ever practices what they preach...but, at some time on any given day, we say something that someone should or shouldn't do, and then turn around and do the opposite. My mind trails back to the elections last month - all of the candidates for different offices are constantly sliging mud at each other -- and calling their opponents on speaking out both sides of their mouth seems to be one of the biggest accusations made.

That wasn't what brought this idea about though. I was sitting in worship on Sunday morning, and, as is often the case, there were a couple of children that were being particularly vocal. This went on, and after a bit, the woman sitting in front of me turned around to see who the culprit was -- a few different times - and a look of displeasure was all too evident on her face. Now, maybe it's because I've dealt with kids so much, maybe it's because I've spent so much time in church services, maybe it's even because I'm not a parent myself, that I've gotten to the point where most often I just ignore those outbursts. I guess I also figure that the parent is frustrated enough with a child that doesn't want to be quiet, that they don't need 20 pairs of eyes reminding them that the child in their lap is not quiet.

This went off and on for the next 10 minutes or so...and after the woman had turned around to look a fair few times - something happened - her cell phone went off...during the church service. Her husband sat there shaking his head, and she fumbled around trying to find it so she could turn it off. It was all I could do not to chuckle.

Then, last night, I was chatting with a friend of mine about broken committments, and how bad we feel when that happens. This friend mentioned how she felt even worse because she'd been getting after her boss for doing the same type of thing, and I sat thinking for a moment. My response to her was that all to often, it seems like the things we criticize others about the most are the things we have the most trouble with ourselves - it's a lot easier to fix someone else's problems than our own. Also, when we find ourselves doing those things we detest, we are that much harder on ourselves because we see ourselves in a different, imperfect light.

So, we are a nation with planks in our own eyes, trying desperately to see the specks in the eyes of those around us. Cut others some slack - and cut yourself some slack...after all, no one is perfect.

Living in the technology age

I don't know what I would do without Google. It is something I use now to get info on just about everything - recipes, definitions, translations of words and phrases in other languages, picutres of things for art references, ideas for Bible studies, you get the picture. It seems to be the catchall for things unknown - within reason of course, but it's just always there a click away if I need it.

I know as well as the next guy that you have to take what you find there with a grain of salt, but, there are so many and varied answers for each question, that often all it takes is some comparison and a little bit of background work. But, with all of these answers and all of this information at the tips of our fingers (literally), are we being created as a society that no longer thinks for ourselves, but immediately turns to someone else's ideas to form our own? We're taking a veritable back seat to life if that is the case, and the idea of reinventing the wheel has been done away with all together, it seems instead that we have mass produced the wheel instead to such a degree that our supply will never run out.

I know this sounds like quite an extreme perspective, after all, with the comment I made earlier about having to examine the information we find, it seems that the information is merely a springboard to finding the true information on our own so that we can put it to work for whatever purpose we deem necessary. However, that is assuming that everyone who uses the info actually does consider it. Reality is that everything from our neighbor's personal information to the answers to next weeks test to a copy of that essay on the war in Iraq is available to us, with no necessary work (as long as the price is right).

How then, do we keep ourselves, and others for that matter, from falling into the habit of turning off our minds and letting the existing information be the be all end all of our existence? One thing is sure - make sure when you're surfing the web, the waves of information don't drag you in with them.