My View

We’re a quick fix culture. I wanna learn how to do business in a 2 day intensive course. I wanna learn how to heal people I pray for in a 2 day intensive course. I wanna learn new stuff by reading a 2 page summary. I wanna get rich without working. I wanna graduate without studying.

So what if life is more complex? What if you have to study 5 years to graduate? What if you have to live 15 years to learn? What if maturity really does come with learning from experience?

When you study Biblical leaders you can see this really clearly: most leaders have gone through periods of what we could call

building, breaking and blessing.

Look at Moses, for example. 40 years of training and blessing in Egypt. Then 40 years of training in the desert. Then 40 years of blessing. 40 years in the desert!

A guy called Stephen R. Covey (see previous post) studied management and self-help literature published in the US from 1776-1976. Fairly soon he could spot a trend; the literature from the roughly first 150 years and the literature from the roughly 50 last years were different. During the first 150 years of American history, almost all of these books focused on one theme: character. “If you live a life of integrity, honesty, and good character, you will prosper.” The more recent books focused on personality. “If you think this way, or do this, or smile that way, or understand this, you will prosper.” But barely no mention of character.

There’s an ancient fable about a farmer that has a goose that lays golden eggs. Every morning he gets one. So he sells it. The next morning he gets another one. And sells that one. This keeps going, and the farmer gets quite rich. But then one day he gets greedy. So he kills the goose, wanting to harvest all the golden eggs at once. Obviously (what a strange word to use in this circumstance), he finds none. So he doesn’t get all the gold at once. And since he killed the goose, he won’t get any more gold.

Having a good character, according to these American gurus before World War I, is a bit like having a goose that lays golden eggs. So what is the point of all of this? I think Covey is right. We need to start focusing more on our building good character, and less on finding quick fixes to our problems. Because if we sort out our “goose”, the fruit will come.

The Bible speaks of the same thing: What your heart is full of, your mouth will say. (No use in trying to focus on the mouth, focus on the heart.) Jesus talks about an inner well with living water that will overflow, quenching thirst eternally. He also speaks about him being the vine, and us being the branches. What does this mean?

Jesus can fill your heart. Jesus can create a well of living water within you, that will quench your thirst. Forever. Jesus can give you new life, so that you bear much fruit, if you’re connected to him.

He can change you from the inside out. And that’s the way lasting change works - from the inside out. Not the other way around.

And btw, the changing is seldom quick.

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Been watching the news today, with an interview on Al-Jazeera with the Finnish President Tarja Halonen. Halonen was interviewed by reporter Ahmed Mansour as the head of the state of the country holding the rotating presidency of the European Union. The discussion, which aired on Al-Jazeera last week was quite harsh, seems to be Al-Jazeera’s style.

Anyway, watching this heated discussion got me surfing on the web. This got me onto a site where a Lebanese journalist gives his views on the war. Really interesting to read, and probably an article that will get him killed in his country. A quote:

Each Irano-Syrian fort that Jerusalem destroys, each islamic fighter they eliminate, and Lebanon proportionally starts to live again! Once again, the soldiers of Israel are doing our work. Once again, like in 1982, we are watching – cowardly, lying low, despicable, and insulting them to boot – their heroic sacrifice that allows us to keep hoping. To not be swallowed up in the bowels of the earth. Because, of course, by dint of not giving a damn for southern Lebanon, of letting foreigners take hold of the privileges that belong to us, we no longer had the ability to recover our independence and sovereignty. If, at the end of this war, the Lebanese army retakes control over its territory and gets rid of the state within a state – that tried to suffocate the latter –, it will only be thanks to Tsahal [the Israeli Defense Forces. Translator’s note]

The article also shows a satellite picture of Beirut with the areas that are “destroyed by Israel” marked. Interesting… The media reports I seem to be reading/hearing/seeing give a totally different picture…

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Following up on my own post about abortions a few days ago, I started wondering about abortion rates in Europe. I stumbled upon some abortion statistics for the Nordic countries and the UK.

Abortion figures

Sweden: approx. 34 000 abortions in 2003, every 4th child is aborted
Norway: approx. 14 000 abortions in 2003, every 5th child is aborted
Finland: approx. 11 000 abortions in 2003, every 6th child is aborted
Denmark: approx. 16 000 abortions in 2003, every 5th child is aborted
UK (England & Wales): 185 400 abortions in 2004, approx. every 6th child is aborted

Stats from STAKES and Department of Health

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My brother-in-law wanted me to watch 2 DVDs with stand-up comedy. There are worse ways to spend an evening, I thought, so why not? The videos were “Dress to Kill” and “Glorious” by Eddie Izzard, a British stand-up comedian. If you haven’t seen anything of Eddie Izzard before, prepare for a shock. He’s not the conventional type of guy. He describes himself as an executive transvestite, whatever that means.

But he’s funny, extremely so, and in an intelligent type of way. Not below the belt, or insulting people, but bright. I liked him. Something of an intellectual court jester.

My favourite sketch is one where he tries to imagine the Church of England doing a “Spanish Inquisition”. Dress To Kill transcript from auntiemomo.com.

“Cake or death?” That’s a pretty easy question. Anyone could answer that.

— “Cake or death?”
— “Eh, cake please.”
— “Very well! Give him cake!”
— “Oh, thanks very much. It’s very nice.”
— “You! Cake or death?”
— “Uh, cake for me, too, please.”
— “Very well! Give him cake, too! We’re gonna run out of cake at this rate. You! Cake or death?”
— “Uh, death, please. No, cake! Cake! Cake, sorry. Sorry…”
— “You said death first, uh-uh, death first!”
— “Well, I meant cake!”
— “Oh, all right. You’re lucky I’m Church of England!” Cake or death?”
— “Uh, cake please.”
— “Well, we’re out of cake! We only had three bits and we didn’t expect such a rush. So what do you want?”
— “Well, so my choice is ‘or death’? I’ll have the chicken then, please.
— “Taste of human, sir. Would you like a white wine? There you go, thank you very much.”
— “ Thank you for flying Church of England, cake or death?”

Hilarious.

But as always, it got me thinking. Where do these comedians get their stuff from? Eddie Izzard makes fun of the church pretty rough (especially Church of England). But it’s not in a “facing ridicule in the footsteps of Jesus” -kind of way. It’s laughing at the church because it very often IS ridiculous. Totally out of touch with culture, hypocritical, and lame.

I want to change that.

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I got a couple of books for Christmas. One of them, Freakonomics, is actually really freaky. It’s all about an economist exploring different questions with the help of tools from economics.

One of the chapters has to do with a huge drop in the crime rate in the US at the beginning of the nineties. The author (Steven D. Levitt) argues that the popular explanations for the dropping crime rates such as better policing, stronger economy etc fail to count for the big drop in crime. The actual reason, he proposes (and gives good stats for), is the legalization of abortion (Roe vs Wade) about twenty years earlier (Jan 22, 1973). This would mean that many of “the undesirable elements of society”, poor and miserable teenagers who would have gone into crime, were simply never born.

Interesting theory, and might be true. This doesn’t mean that I condone or support abortion (and neither do the authors, at least not directly). Just the facts… (This last statement can really frustrate some non-NTs, read more about MBTI). Anyway, there are some hidden nuggets of information in this chapter. Did you know that there are about 1.6 million abortions every year in the US? This means that roughly every 3rd US child/fetus is aborted, never born (4 million births per year).

Which gets kind of personal, when I have three kids. Which of my three kids shouldn’t have been born? The first one? The second one? Third one? Impossible question, and skewed as well. Pro-abortion people would probably argue that you can’t compare a fetus to a child, but still. I do compare them. 1.6 million… that’s a huge number…

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