Daniel Hannan

This British guy speaks for me (both clips are worth watching if you have 15 minutes):

With Joe Scarborough:



With Glenn Beck:

Friday Fun

Videos like this make sleepy, cranky Fridays more tolerable:

Worship Songs Cause a Black Hole in Springfield

So, Sunday, our exuberant music leader at church chose the song "You're Grace Is Enough" followed closely by the wonderful hymn "Amazing Grace."

Then in chapel at work today, we sang exactly the same two songs in exactly the same order, including the horrible, repetitive, annoying "Praise Him" verse to "Amazing Grace."

As I sat there, realizing the implications of two different worship leaders singing the same songs in the same order, slowly I could feel a tiny black hole forming in my brain and sucking away my patience, even though I really love "Amazing Grace."

I'm poised to rant about modern worship music. Stay tuned.

Why method matters to the Holy Spirit

As many of you know, I am simultaneously more and less aware of my surroundings than most other people. I am quite aware of the minutia and the influences involved but can be ignorant of the big picture stuff. In other words, I study the method and form, and oftentimes the message is lost on me.

Spiritual Emphasis Week around AG headquarters means 5 days in a row of chapel services here at work. Our speakers have ranged from the screeching old lady to the hilarious guy to the apostle-style, all-Jesus'-business guy.

This year our speaker is a young evangelist (probably 36 or 37 years old). His message and attitude immediately struck me as being Holy Spirit-filled and anointed.

My problem with how the service went down is entirely in the method of presentation. After a long intro (we sang 3 choruses, which is a lot in a 1-hour program) and prayer, our speaker got up with his wife. She talked while he stood politely in the background, then she sang a special number while he sang politely in the background. Then he began to speak. The message felt a little disjointed, though he had some poignant points, and he cut out the final story and, apparently, the conclusion due to time constraints.

In my experience, S.E. Week often succeeds or fails based on the relationship the speaker has with God, followed closely by the relationship the audience develops with the speaker. The former is the most important, and the latter takes time to build but is crucial.

The problem is that on Day 1 the speaker must build that relationship foundation with the audience as strong as is possible. By letting his wife take charge initially after he was introduced and giving the audience a special music piece, our first impression was of his wife, not of him. In the baby duckling sense, we bonded more with her when we should have been bonding with him. She will have the rest of the week to sing or could have even at the end of today's service, but he should have been the one to initiate the audience.

Then to top it off, in the middle of his message about the power of the Holy Spirit, he forgot to conclude and jumped right to everyone standing and praying. I guess my main point in all of this is that God can move in extreme circumstances but that humans are mundane, systemic, relational beings. The speaker's job is to streamline the avenue from the spiritual to the earthly. His method felt abrupt, and the service suffered for it.

My New Teacher is Amber!

My friend Amber is crazy, fun, smart, and professional. I have always wondered how fun it would be to be a student in her class.

Well, now I know. My current teacher reminded me of Amber immediately, if Amber were teaching college. This was long before she mentioned Johnny Depp and swooned over her mental image of him while standing in front of our class.

I'm sure to have many stories about her.

I'm going to love the next four weeks.

:)

My New Year's Resolution, first quarter

The first 2.5 months of my new year's rez are completed. I'm giving up the soda for a year. Here are some noticeable results (remember, I'm doing this to significantly cut down on my high fructose corn syrup intake).

1. My twitches are down about 90 percent. They still strike me a bit, but they are weaker and have a much shorter duration.

2. The other health problems I mentioned in my original post are gone.

3. I miss caffeine. I've got come iced tea, which I hate but is drinkable when I need a caffeine boost. So far, I have had 2glasses of the stuff in about 3 weeks of having it in the house.

4. My tongue still yearns for the sweet, fizzy goodness that is soda. The key here for future consumption after this year will be how much I like it when I try one on January 1. If it makes me sick, then I may quit forever.

5. My water intake has increased considerably now that I don't have a gentle bubble massage and sugar coating for my tongue when I get thirsty.

6. I'm tired a lot. This is not new, but the soda wasn't the cause. Probably school is the cause. Maybe I'll quit that for next year's resolution.

Classes #2 and #3 finished

This happened a long time ago. I've been derelict in updating my readers on my progress. I've finished with class 4 now. The next couple blogs will be updates.

Both of these classes were taught by the same lady. Class #2 was a grammar intensive class in which I got a 94 percent, which is an A. They do plus and minus, but I really don't care about that. It was tougher than I thought, but I pretty much knew most of the grammar stuff, which was nice.

Class #3 was a tough history of the media class. With about 7 pages of writing per week and 100 pages of reading with a 50-point test each week was pretty rough. Twice she said the testing was over the terminology, but about 10 questions per test were about miniscule facts within the reading. We asked her about this both times after her statements, and she promised to keep to her word, then did the same thing each week. Still, I got about a 95 percent in the class despite the rigged tests. Check yet another "A" box.

So that's three classes and three A's! They are not easy, but since I wish to be a writer, I'm practicing doing well on each paper I write. Due to my diligence, I have rarely lost points on the papers.

About the situation with my parents (part 3 of 3)

The, I'm sure, long awaited conclusion of my thoughts about my parents is finally here! To tell you the truth, I have been working on this for the entire interim. My constant thinking about it or my several rewrites keep bringing me back to the same place. Every time I try to work through the issues in their entirety, I end up further entangling myself in the deep web laid for me by my father. I whittled all my ideas down to one single paragraph:

I have asked myself some questions addressing the issues brought up by Scott Adams. Do I have any favors left to give or any secrets I could entrust to my father? No. He has shown me that my favors are unwanted or unaccepted, and I don’t entrust secrets to people who then use them to try to control me. Do I have anything left to gain from him? No. All he had to give me were lavish gifts. All I wanted was acceptance or respect, no strings attached, no subtle manipulations to make me “better”. My father only gave me the latter, paying only lip service to the former. Then I had one final question for myself: Can I live with the knowledge that I can never prove myself to him? This answer I do not yet have, but I can truly say life is more peaceful now than it ever was. I would trade many things for a little peace, the most prized of which is the need to be accepted by my father.

That's my conclusion. When I feel the need to justify myself, I realize I am merely stuck defending myself against the individual attacks and not properly addressing the source and the premise which all these issues spring from. My father creates a web, from which he can obtain a level of control over those entangled. I feel sorry for everyone stuck in it. I feel sorry for him, in a way, though it won't change my response. I have made mistakes, but have done nothing wrong. I'm okay with that. Donald is right. I think about this too much. It's time to "let go of those who don't love you, and embrace those who do."

About the situation with my parents (part 2 of 3)

[My wife made a good point about my previous post, so I modified paragraphs 3 and 4 under Point 1 for clarity.]

Point 2: In the escalation that followed my decision to finally respond to his accusations about presents, all the favors I did for my father were dismissed.

Favors carry weight. Over the years, I have tried to make a conscious effort to do many favors for my father, including helping him move stuff, clearing brush and branches from their back yard, shoveling stones, even inviting him out disc golfing and playing Halo—doing my best to always be available. After the worst day of my life in August of 2000 (caused by both my mother and my father), I considered my actions between then and now to be favors. These were all attempts at quality time and to be part of the family—to try to establish a better relationship than the shaky one we had. In his Christmas letter to me, my father said, “You get out of family what you put into it. Honestly, it has not felt like you have invested much of anything in [our relationship] for a long time.” In one simple statement, he nullified what I had attempted to build with him for years.

Since my actions meant little, I determined that my efforts were a waste of my time. If my efforts were meaningless, then the rest of the "hanging out with them" motive was gone. My father had already destroyed gift giving and receiving for me. In a final attempt to disengage from a point of contention that had existed for years, I returned some birthday gifts with the statement that I still wanted to keep trying to have a relationship. My mother then disinvited us from her 50th birthday celebration.

Our relationship had unraveled. The ties that bind were severed, and the rest of the rigging fell down as a result. The relationship was gone. I'm not a glutton for awkward moments, meaningless actions, or emotional lashings meant to set me straight. If actions mean nothing, then words mean less.

So I ended up stuck with the question, Why talk to him? Not talking to him is not meant to be a punishment of him; I consider not talking to him to be the realistic reaction to the liberties he took in our relationship. I wouldn’t talk to anyone else in this circumstance, either.

My dad turned our disagreement into a crusade against a litany of choices in my life that he disliked or disagreed with. Many of his accusations were weakly supported by hearsay or incorrect conjecture or just bad facts; many others were simply his opinion against mine. When confronted with proper evidence or my actual reasoning, my father refused to back down.

The relationship felt destructive. I had to make a call. How many more beatings was I willing to take for the sake of building a relationship where the efforts on my part were counted worthless? I took a hard look at my poker hand and decided to fold. Better to lose some, than to continue with a losing hand and lose more.

I refuse to suffer the slavish chains of my family’s enmeshment. If my options are enmeshment or no contact, then my choice is no contact. My father did not allow me a third option.

(Part 3 will come soon.)

About the situation with my parents (part 1 of 3)

Hopefully this will be the last series of blogs about my recent history with my parents. In the last year and a half I have been attempting to focus down to identify the major problem(s) with the words my father spoke and wrote to me. I had a feeling that I would never be able to define it on my own. As is usual in this kind of circumstance, I kept my eyes open, and the answer revealed itself in the unlikeliest of places.

The blog I quoted in full in my last post gave me the framework on which to hang my conclusions about my parents and sister (read that before this). In this post, when I speak about my family, I’m only referring to my parents, my sister, and me.

Point 1: My secrets which could have brought us closer were used against me.

My family has many secrets. The fact that secrets lay hidden under the floorboards of my parents’ house is ironic because of all my father’s talk for years about “being open” and “laying all [his] cards on the table.” When you know things about someone - their weaknesses, their struggles - this knowledge, when used correctly, is the tie that binds. Friends can become closer that brothers or sisters because of big secrets. Of course, the situation changes entirely when they are used against you.

Though given in a spirit of sharing, what I thought were family bonding "secrets" became weapons in the hands of my father, the classic manipulator. I’m not talking “secrets” in the “hide these things from all other people” category, but more along the lines of telling him things no one else knows and the reasons behind choices - stuff like that.

I have often felt that in the eyes of my father, I was never good enough - namely because of his regular habit of criticizing me on both large and small topics. So when my father started to criticize me on my sister’s behalf about presents she received from me, a terribly destructive habit he repeated over the years, and when I decided to directly respond to his accusations for the first time, he didn't like me defending myself, and suddenly my secrets were fair game. Secrets I told him over the last few years were drudged up and used against me like a battering ram.

I’m still not sure what my father hoped to gain. It would be like if I came over to your house and complained about your life choices in relation to how you could give me or my wife what we think we deserve from you if only you had made (what we consider to be) better decisions. I may never know what he hoped to gain; however, I know what he lost. He began the journey of diluting his own influence.

People tell each other secrets small and large. At times these secrets are compromised - that's life. But whose interest is being guarded? After many years of witnessing his behavior, I came to the conclusion that my father never really had my best interests at heart. Thus, every secret entrusted to him was prey to his machinations (dictionary definition: "a scheming or crafty action, subtle maneuver, or artful design intended to accomplish some end; especially : one regarded as evil or reprehensible").

When it comes to trust, I always face a simple choice: I am either open to you or closed to you. There is no middle ground for me.

...to be continued...

(Parts 2 and 3 will come in the next few days.)