Imagine It Is Your Birthday

Your birthday is special; it’s a time you look forward to celebrating with friends and family. But imagine if this is what your birthday was like.

Imagine it is your birthday. At first just your family and a few friends celebrate it with you. It is a quiet celebration.

However, as time goes on, more and more people get to know you. They decide they want to celebrate your birthday as well. The birthday parties become more elaborate and widespread. Every so often someone comes to your birthday party who doesn’t know you personally but you don’t mind, you’re glad they are having a good time.

As the years go on, more and more people hear about you. Even people in other countries know about you and decide they want to celebrate your birthday as well. They come up with many strange and different ways to celebrate you birthday.

Somewhere along the way, in addition to giving you presents for your birthday, people start giving presents to each other. This idea becomes really popular. Before long, even people who have no idea who you are begin giving and receiving presents on your birthday. They even start making up lists of things they want to be given on your birthday!

People begin having parties on your birthday but never mention you or even give you a second thought. They are having so much fun celebrating by giving presents to each other they don’t even bother giving you any presents. They send out birthday cards to each other that have nothing to do with you.

Then one day, someone says to you “I don’t think we should invite you to the birthday party anymore. You make some people uncomfortable. Please just go away and let us have the party without you.”

Imagine your birthday was like that. How would you like it?

Isn’t that what has happened to Jesus Christ’s birthday? Hasn’t it become a birthday party at which He is not welcome?

Second-Hand Profanity

Recently, my wife and I were having dinner in a restaurant that is near the campus of Salisbury University. It was an early Saturday evening so, not surprisingly, the crowded restaurant had many patrons in their 20’s.

The restaurant was noisy, which was to be expected. What I did not expect was the second-hand profanity made up the ambiance of the restaurant. Several nearby groups of young diners had free-flowing profanity as a major part of their dinner conversation. They were particularly fond of using f-bombs. Not only were these groups co-ed, some of the women were using the f-bombs right along with the guys. These groups didn’t give a second thought to others in the restaurant, including several families with young children.

I really enjoy this restaurant but the second-hand profanity ruined the evening for us. What’s more, since it was several groups using this offensive language, I didn’t go from table to table and ask them to stop—it seems we were in the minority.

I am intentionally using the term “second hand profanity.” Second-hand smoke has been recognized as a real hazard and irritant. Smokers have had to accept the fact that their freedom to smoke doesn’t give them the right to inflict that smoke upon others. I think the same principle applies to second-hand profanity. Someone’s freedom of speech expressed as profanity does not give them the right to inflict it upon bystanders.

As a Christian, I believe that words have great power to either help or harm. Words can inspire or leave scars that last a lifetime. I think profanity is a careless use of offensive words that have no positive effect and in fact have great potential to harm.

According to studies, profanity is becoming much more common and accepted in our culture. The halls of our schools echo with language that would have embarrassed sailors a couple of generations ago. However, being more common doesn’t make it right.

Perhaps restaurants and public facilities need to separate the profane and non-profane. Perhaps there can be a “cursing-free section” in restaurants, theatres, athletic arenas [Ball games are another location where profanity has become not only accepted but expected!], etc. Of course, if we who are offended by profanity are indeed a shrinking minority, we may find ourselves as social outcasts like the forlorn smokers forced outside to grab a smoke.

I would be interested to hear if profanity bothers you and if so how you handle it in public situations. If it doesn’t bother you, I’d be interested in your defense of profanity.

Taxes…The Beatles were right again!
What do the Beatles and Maryland’s current special legislative session have in common?

As a Beatles’ fan for more than 40 years, it never ceased to amaze me how much insight into life these young men from Liverpool showed in some of their songs. Remember how the song “Eleanor Rigby” so eloquently expressed the haunting pain of loneliness?

Well, they knew much about government and taxes as well. Here are the lyrics written by George Harrison in angry response to the abusive taxes in Great Britain all those years ago.

Taxman

Let me tell you How it will be.

There's one for you,Nineteen for me, '

Cause I'm the taxman.

Yeah, I'm the taxman.

Should five percent Appear too small,

Be thankful I don't Take it all.

'Cause I'm the taxman.

Yeah, I'm the taxman. I

f you drive a car,I'll tax the street.

If you drive to city,I'll tax your seat.

If you get too cold,I'll tax the heat.I

f you take a walk,I'll tax your feet.

Taxman!

'Cause I'm the taxman.

Yeah, I'm the taxman.

Don't ask me what I want it for,

If you don't want to pay some more.

'Cause I'm the taxman.

Yeah, I'm the taxman.

And my advice to Those who die.

Declare the pennies On your eyes.

'Cause I'm the taxman.

Yeah, I'm the taxman,

And you're working for no one but me.

This brings me to the current special session of Maryland’s legislature. This session was called because of the “crisis” of a huge budget deficit of $1.6 billion facing the state next year.

[These things are always portrayed as crises, which demand urgent drastic measures. Were there no accountants around when the legislature passed all these spending bills to warn them they were spending more money than the state would take in?]

Now we are told drastic measures are needed. What is their creative response to this “crisis?” More taxes! Income taxes are going up, sales tax is going up, car titling tax is going up, and cigarette tax is going up. [Here’s my prediction for the not-to-distant future: when people stop smoking in large numbers, another budget crisis will cause the desperate search for new taxes to replace lost income from cigarette tax.]

Harrison perfectly caught the attitude of politicians and taxes: “don’t ask me what I want it for if you don’t want to pay some more…you’re working for no one but me.” Enough is enough.

Even though Maryland is effectively a one-party state, I urge you to take a hard look at the candidates you vote to send to Annapolis. If we send enough political leaders with a heart to serve the people, maybe we can change the attitude of the Taxman.

Is That It?

Could there be a less fulfilling World Series than the one just concluded by Boston and Colorado? There have been Delmarva Shorebirds-Hickory Crawdads series with more excitement. [These are Single A minor league affiliates of the Baltimore Orioles and Pittsburg Pirates respectively.]

Is it the fact that I’m getting older or has baseball--all professional sports for that matter—lost its magic?

I have been a lifelong baseball fan. I remember when people anxiously anticipated the outcome of World Series games. Long before there were sports bars, you could go into many a local business and the World Series would be on the radio by the cash register. People talked about the games in the barber shops, around the water cooler at work, and in the coffee shops.

How different it is today. Quick, without looking it up, who was the winning pitcher of the deciding game of this year’s World Series?

The biggest baseball news of this Fall has been from the team which didn’t make it out of the first round of the playoffs, the New York Yankees. The best player in baseball, Alex Rodriquez, opted out of his contract to play anywhere else but for the Yankees. The manager who won four World Series’ championships, Joe Torre, was effectively shown the door and told to not let it hit him in the butt on the way out.

[By the way, Joe is not the only Yankee manager to which such a thing has happened. Charles Dillon Stengel, known to everyone as “Casey” and “The Old Professor, had an even more successful career and a more ignoble departure as Yankee manager. Casey like Torre managed the Yankees for 12 seasons. During that span they played in 10 World Series and won 7 of them. His clubs included Joe Dimagio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford. Yet after losing the 1960 World Series in 7 games to the Pittsburg Pirates because of the late inning heroics of Bill Mazeraski, Stengel was dismissed being told by management that he was too old to manage.]

Frankly, baseball and all sports have become overexposed. We know the most intimate details about the players which as a result makes them seem smaller somehow. Cal Ripken may be the last baseball hero. We have sports saturation as a result of cable networks like ESPN which have an insatiable appetite for events to hype and fill their 24/7/365 schedules.

By the time the championship is finally decided, we are weary of it all and just anxious for it to be over. As a result, the World Series is anticlimactic. By the time it concludes, we really don’t care. We lifelong baseball fans ask ourselves “Is that it?”

THE SHELL GAME

Some things never go out of style. Take the shell game for example. You may have seen this game—or a variation of it such as “3 Card Monte”—on the midway of a fly-by-night carnival. The concept is very simple: the slyly smiling con artist running the game shows you a pea, puts it under one of three shells lined up in front of you, mixes up the shells with lightning fast moves, then challenges you to find the pea. You are certain you followed the shell with the pea and you confidently point to it. He lifts the shell to reveal it is empty! Stunned you try again—same result, no pea! No matter how many times you try it, the guy’s hand is always quicker than your eyes.

They must teach this game at orientation classes for politicians. Many political leaders do this regularly. Our taxes are collected for worthwhile and noble purposes. Yet, so many of those promised noble services are never delivered while our taxes never seem to be sufficient. Like the shell game operator, no matter how carefully government operations are watched by the public, we never can find the elusive pea of fiscal responsibility.

Which brings me to the situation in my state of Maryland. We are told that there is a $1.7 billion deficit in this year’s state government budget. Our erstwhile Governor O’Malley has proposed that the solution is raising taxes and finally getting approval for state-sponsored slot machines.

When an individual or family faces a budget deficit—more month than money—they look at both sides of the budget equation. They look at ways they can get more income. They also look at ways to reduce spending in order to restore budget balance. Individuals and families recognize they can’t do everything they’d like to do and still live within their means. They make hard spending decisions based on what is more important to them. In this way, they learn to live within their income.

Government always looks at ways to get more income—taxes and gambling are always the prime methods. However, I never hear discussion about reducing spending. It’s as if the thought never occurs to the smartest minds in Annapolis. It seems our political leaders are never willing to acknowledge they can’t give us everything everyone wants. Their solution is to keep the shells moving, all the while taking more money out of our pockets. As I said, some games never go out of style.

Governor O’Malley has called for a special session of the legislature to enact this latest round of shell manipulation. It’s great timing for such action. Most of us will pay no attention to what’s going on in Annapolis. We’ll be too busy getting ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas to notice the games being played with our money in Annapolis.

In my next posting I want to talk about shell game of state-sponsored gambling.

WHEN WOULD YOU GO?

I find the idea of time travel fascinating. It was a key element of storytelling in one of my all-time favorite television series The Twilight Zone, the original created by Rod Serling not the lame imitation of a few years ago. Classic time travel stories take a person unexpectedly from the familiar surroundings of their own time to places either in the past or the future.

Rev. Samuel Madden is considered one of the first writers to tell a time travel story, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century: Being original letters of state under George the Sixth written in 1733. Others from Mark Twain to Washington Irving to Charles Dickens to Isaac Asimov to Robert Heinlein to Woody Allen have joined Madden and Serling in writing about time travel.

All those stories seemed wonderfully fanciful. But maybe not. Quantum theory suggests the possibilty of time travel. Who knows if it might be possible to step through a time portal and find yourself suddenly in another time, another place?

Which leads me to the point of this: when would you go if you could travel anywhere in time to the past or the future?

I love history so there are many historic moments in the past I would love to visit. Some of them are:
· As a Christian there are many moments from the Bible I would love to visit: the Garden of Eden, to see Noah building the Ark, the parting of the Red Sea, and the confrontation of David with Goliath. Most of all I would love to be there at daybreak on the first Easter morning when Jesus emerged from the tomb.

· One of my heroes has always been Davy Crockett. I would like to be in the Alamo when Davy and the others make their heroic last stand against Santa Anna’s army.

· I would love to be there on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong steps off the landing pad of Eagle and onto the surface of the moon.

There are also moments in the past that are only meaningful to me that I’d love to visit—or revisit.

· How thrilling it would be to witness the moment my parents met for the first time. I’d love to see them as teenagers who meet having no idea what the future has in store for them.

· I’d give anything to go back in time and sit around my Mom-Mom Collins’ Sunday dinner table with my family. Though we were poor, that table was filled with wonderful homemade dishes of every description, with her fried chicken at the center. The joy and love around that table was priceless.

· I’d love to be in the Midway Drive-in Theatre on a hot early June night in 1968 when I met Karen, my future wife. It would be embarrassing to see how awkward and slightly intoxicated I was but it would be worth it to see how gorgeous she was—and still is.

Time travel is intriguing to think about. Regardless of the mechanics—a visit from Christmas Ghosts or sitting in a sleigh surrounded by blinking lights—the concept is awesome to consider. These are some of the times to which I would travel. Let me ask you: when and why would you go in time? I’d really be interested to hear from you.

LEST WE FORGET

My local newspaper, The Daily Times [Salisbury, Maryland], ran a front page story today that was hardly a scoop. It tells the sad story of the rapidly fading corporate remembrance of the events of September 11, 2001.

In the years immediately following 2001, September 11 was marked by well-attended memorial events, both secular and religious. But in more recent years, poor attendance resulted in the cancellation of most community 9/11 memorial events. I attended an excellent worship service today but their was no mention of the impending anniversary of the terrorists’ attack on America. This year’s observances shall be confined to first-responders’ organizations.

Why has this happened? It certainly didn’t happen following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. How can we so quickly forget such a cataclysmic event in United States history that occurred just six years ago?

It would be simple to find the answers in some sweeping analysis of society. However, I think the answers are much simpler; I think it is found in two of the primary causes of forgetfulness.

Stress: We all live in a stress-packed environment. No matter your age or occupation we are all under immense stress. If you are a student, you’ve got the stress of being socially accepted, studying to be able to pass the state examinations, and the hectic schedule of sports practices and music lessons. If you’re a parent, you’ve got all of your kids’ schedules to keep in addition to keeping your job so you can pay the mortgage, car payment, and credit card bills. Ask a farm family dealing with this year’s devastating drought, they can tell you about stress. If you’re a retiree, you’ve got the stress of worrying about your pension, your health, and trying to figure out how to fit into a world where everything is changing.

Get the idea? We are all so stressed with the challenges of real life that we can’t seem to take the time or have the energy to look at the bigger picture which includes the post-September 11th world in which we are living.

What’s more, if we keep the vivid memory of the ugly realities of 9/11, then we are forced to face the fact of how vulnerable we all are to such attacks today. Even after spending billions of dollars, it is doubtful that you and I are any safer from attacks by suicidal fanatics.
It would seem we’ve taken the Scarlet O’Hara approach to dealing with hard and uncomfortable facts: “I’ll worry about that tomorrow!”

Fatigue: A related problem to stress is fatigue. Fatigue and stress feed on each other like an emotion atomic reaction, one intensifies the other.

Everyone is fatigued these days. Like stress, fatigue afflicts every age group. Children are getting less sleep because of long hours of school, soccer, and homework. Adults find they have so much to do that the only way they can even come close to keeping all their commitments is to use time they would normally sleep. We are people who are physically exhausted—that’s one reason for the skyrocketing popularity of the new energy drinks and high-octane Starbuck’s coffee. In spite of these, fatigue causes us to limit ourselves to dealing with the most immediate and personal matters. We just don’t have the energy to worry about the world at large.

Another kind of fatigue that is also making us forgetful about 9/11: war fatigue. We have been fighting the Iraq War longer than we fought World War II yet a victorious conclusion seems nowhere in sight. Instead, it seems to be never-ending. We are weary of trying to fight terrorism by being in league with corrupt Iraqi politicians, an inept Iraqi army, and an Iraqi population that seems more devoted to settling ancient tribal grudges than they are to defeating global terrorists. We are simply tired of the Iraq War which we said we were fighting as payback for 9/11.

Remembering 9/11 only makes us more frustrated and fatigued, so we choose to stop remembering.

Until the next attack happens.

The words of philosopher George Santayana will echo on Tuesday “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”