Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 175

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Sick: A Memoir," by Porochista Khakpour:

When my mother admitted she saw me as sick, I cried for hours. She thought she had done something wrong, but I let her know it was the opposite. To be seen, to be heard, to exist wholly, whether in beauty or ugliness, by a parent often felt like another big step to wellness. I experienced it rarely, but when I did, I felt something light in me that I had long thought had burnt out.

It is no coincidence then that doctors and patients and the entire Lyme community report—anecdotally, of course, as there is still a frustrating scarcity of good data on anything Lyme-related—that women suffer the most from Lyme. They tend to advance into chronic and late-stage forms of the illness most because often it’s checked for last, as doctors often treat them as psychiatric cases first. The nebulous symptoms plus the fracturing of articulacy and cognitive fog can cause any Lyme patient to simply appear mentally ill and mentally ill only. This is why we hear that young women—again, anecdotally—are dying of Lyme the fastest. This is also why we hear that chronic illness is a woman’s burden. Women simply aren’t allowed to be physically sick until they are mentally sick, too, and then it is by some miracle or accident that the two can be separated for proper diagnosis. In the end, every Lyme patient has some psychiatric diagnosis, too, if anything because of the hell it takes getting to a diagnosis.

An Uncomfortable Truth

This interview of Disney heiress Abigail Disney was so interesting on so many levels.  I was particularly taken by her point about the corrosive effect of having access to a private jet, because I've made a similar point about the difference between riding public transit and driving a car.  You might consider these vastly different situations, but I don't: one separates you in your own bubble from the rest of humanity, and the other puts you squarely in the midst of humanity.  Here's how Ms. Disney puts it:

Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.

You can see why I would resonate with such a sentiment, since I have written at length about how comfort can kill our soul, while discomfort is part of the necessary refining process we all must go through.  And this applies even and especially to the mundane things in life, like how we get around.  For those of us of a certain means, we have the option of making our lives a lot easier, and we usually exercise that option, whether it is where we live or how we shop or what goes into our vacation plans. 

Every decision to either avoid or lean into pain isn't necessarily life or death.  But Ms. Disney is right, albeit that her specific example of a private jet is one most of us will never come close to.  In life, we make big and small decisions, and I do believe that the sum of them get us to either life or death.  Let's choose carefully.

Jesus in My Image or No Jesus at All

Picking up on yesterday's post, I wanted to share an excerpt from a book I just finished, "Jesus Is Risen: Paul and the Early Church," by David Limbaugh:

Paul’s conversion was early—perhaps within five years of Christ’s resurrection—so he probably learned about Jesus from eyewitnesses, possibly from Jesus’ followers as well as his enemies. There were still no written Gospels or apostles’ writings, so by word of mouth Paul likely learned a disturbing version of these events—one that would upset anyone with half his devotion to the God he served. 

Consider the facts as they were likely presented to Paul. This imposter Messiah was born out of wedlock, attracted a motley group of misfit followers with no qualifying credentials, cavorted with overt sinners, and demeaned those learned in the true religion and the Law. Despite His interloping corruption, Jesus reportedly healed people, performed other miracles, and adding insult to injury, violated the Sabbath and flouted other sacred laws. Defying the most respected members of the Sanhedrin—the Jewish high council—He challenged and ridiculed the revered Pharisees, and rather than deferring to their holiness, denounced them as whitewashed tombs with an outward appearance of righteousness but full of hypocrisy and lawlessness (Matt. 23:27). He presumed to discard God’s sacrificial system and inserted Himself as the proper medium to forgive people’s sins. Not only did He contradict the Jews’ messianic expectations, He predicted that Jerusalem, instead of becoming the capital of a newly inaugurated messianic empire, would be annihilated and the Temple would be reduced to abject ruins. On top of all this, this faux liberator wholly failed to bring the Jews their long awaited victory and emancipation, instead ending His life in utter defeat, hanged on a “tree” and thus, according to Old Testament Law, accursed by God (Deut. 21:23). 

All this might have been tolerable had this disgraceful fellow’s blasphemies died along with Him, but His death and rumored resurrection resulted in an explosion of the cult. Once Jesus had been crucified and entombed the religious authorities surely assumed this would be the end of the movement, especially because its leader suffered such an ignominious defeat. After all, Jesus’ followers cowered into the darkness when He was arrested, so the authorities reasonably assumed they would hear nothing further from them. But everything changed days later when Jesus rose from the dead and “presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). Even Jesus’ close family members who had been skeptics thereafter became ardent believers. The movement was expanding at an alarming pace and the authorities knew they had to quash it before it spun out of control.

 

I was going to give the book the ol' TSFABPTLFAT treatment (that's "Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet"), but I decided I wanted to add some commentary to this excerpt.  And that commentary is that oftentimes we either make Jesus into whatever image we want him to be, or we actually see him for who really is and are put off by him.  

 

Finding Jesus in the City

At the risk of reinforcing the kinds of stereotypes that I am ever trying to push against, let me speak to how being an urban Christian connects me more closely to the life of Jesus than if I lived in the suburbs.  This may not seem a surprising statement, except that there remains a prevailing sentiment in modern American Christianity that being of this faith persuasion means attending a respectable church in a suburban community, and that furthermore that urban settings are either cesspools of sin and/or places where you go to do service projects and mercy ministries.  Never mind that the vast majority of the New Testament, and therefore of the stories of the early church, is set in an urban context.  Which is of course not to say that God is only at work in cities, but it is to say that if Jesus, the apostles, and Paul did their thing in cities then surely God is still showing up in those places today too.

Thoughts and Prayers and Faith and Action

“Thoughts & prayers” is mocked when that’s all we do. But prayer moves the Hand that moves the world! It can be the most powerful thing in the world when done in faith, is to put in motion the fullness of the Almighty to right wrongs, heal the sick, make whole those who've been shattered. 

Here's the thing.  Sometimes what He moves is us, into action to help the hurting.  What is the prayer prayed in faith, but that which is able to see that God can use even us to effect that mighty movement of power, and is willing to be swept up in that great work.  Would that we who pray pray this way, w/a faith to call on the Mover and a willingness to be moved by Him.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 174

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World," by Stephen L. Brusatte:

Somewhere around the world—from the deserts of Argentina to the frozen wastelands of Alaska—a new species of dinosaur is currently being found, on average, once a week. Let that sink in: a new dinosaur every . . . single . . . week.

It’s probably not what you were expecting. After some of the largest volcanic eruptions in Earth history desecrated ecosystems, dinosaurs became more diverse, more abundant, and larger. Completely new dinosaur species were evolving and spreading into new environments, while other groups of animals went extinct. As the world was going to hell, dinosaurs were thriving, somehow taking advantage of the chaos around them.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 173

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Grant," by Ron Chernow:

Though Grant was not an abolitionist at the war’s outset, his thinking had evolved in tandem with Lincoln’s and he now opposed slavery on practical, military, and religious grounds, taking on the president’s agenda as his own. As early as the summer of 1861, he had told an army chaplain “he believed slavery would die with this rebellion, and that it might become necessary for the government to suppress it as a stroke of military policy.” Grant’s soon-to-be brother-in-law Michael John Cramer confirmed that “as the war progressed [Grant] became gradually convinced that ‘slavery was doomed and must go.’ He had always recognized its moral evil, as also its being the cause of the war . . . hence General Grant came to look upon the war as a divine punishment for the sin of slavery.”

In a letter to Elihu Washburne, composed eight months after the Emancipation Proclamation, Grant explained that since slavery was the root cause of the war, its eradication formed the only sound basis for any settlement with the South. It had become “patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace reestablished I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.” In later years, Grant explained that many Union soldiers thought it “a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle” and that an early end to the war “would have saved slavery, perhaps, and slavery meant the germs of new rebellion. There had to be an end of slavery.”

Time and Money, Circa 2019

I've been in the habit of doing this "time and money" check every two years (click here for similar posts from 2017, 2015, 2013,  2011,  2009, and 2007), but going forward it might be slightly less often.  Y'know, the whole "I have less time" thing.  Anyway, let's start with time:

Sleep 30% (30% in 2017)
Work 35% (35%)
Kid errands like bedtime, meals, shuttling 15% (15%)
Prayer, church 2.5% (2.5%)
Adult errands like paperwork, chores, house 5% (7.5%)
Adult fun like dates, leisure, exercise 10% (7.5%)
Family fun like outings, board games 2.5% (2.5%)

Still a pretty punishing schedule, but glad I'm holding the line on sleep and making more time for leisure and exercise (dates not so much, although made up for by a few kid-free long weekends throughout the year).

The Documented Life, Part 2 of 2

(See here for Part 1.)




Leisure
M morning – 15 minutes email/social/blog, 15 minutes Scrabble
M evening – 15 minutes social/Internet, 45 minutes read
T morning – 15 minutes email/social/blog, 15 minutes Scrabble, 15 minutes Mandarin podcast
T evening – 15 minutes Mandarin podcast, 30 minutes social/Internet, 30 minutes read
W morning – 15 minutes email/social/blog, 15 minutes Scrabble, 15 minutes Mandarin podcast
W evening – 15 minutes Mandarin podcast, 15 minutes social/Internet, 45 minutes read
Th morning – 15 minutes email/social/blog, 15 minutes Scrabble
Th evening – 15 minutes Mandarin podcast, 15 minutes social/Internet, 30 minutes read
F morning – 15 minutes email/social/blog, 15 minutes Scrabble, 60 minutes w/friends
F evening – 15 minutes Mandarin podcast, 15 minutes social/Internet, 60 minutes w/friends, 45 minutes read
Sa morning – 15 minutes email/social/blog, 45 minutes Netflix
Sa afternoon – 15 minutes Scrabble, 90 minutes w/friends
Sa evening – 30 minutes email/social/blog, 30 minutes read
Su morning – 15 minutes email/social/blog, 60 minutes Netflix
Su afternoon – 15 minutes Scrabble
Su evening – 30 minutes email/social/blog, 30 minutes read

The Documented Life, Part 1 of 2

In the spirit of self-documentation, I’m going to take the next couple of days to recount details from a typical week late last month.  Sometimes it’s a life hack to force yourself to fess up to these details – you’ll think twice about pigging out on potato chips at night if you know you have to write it down and tell the world – but by and large I tried to not let the fact that I was recording everything alter my decisions.

Chores/Errands
M 30 minutes kitchen
T 30 minutes kitchen
W 15 minutes kitchen
Th 30 minutes kitchen
F 30 minutes kitchen, 60 minutes bills/mail
Sa 45 minutes kitchen, 60 minutes groceries, 30 minutes taxes
Su 30 minutes kitchen, 45 minutes food/bike pick-up

Exalting Humility

As recently as 5-10 years ago, it felt like I would average a conversation a month with younger colleagues who (like me) weren’t from Philly and who wanted to make a difference in this city but were feeling boxed in.  They got a lot of “wait your turn, kid,” or “kiss the ring,” or “that won’t work, you’re not from around here.”  And, tired of the push-back, they were lamenting to me that maybe it was time to do their thing somewhere else.  And many did.

I never have that conversation around here anymore.  Part of that is that we’ve changed and become more open to new people and new ideas.  But part of it is that young people nowadays don’t care what people think or say, because they’re just going to do their thing anyway and trust that it’s going to work out alright.  And I appreciate that moxie and I think our city is better for it.