Archives for March 2013
Winter 2013 – Part 2
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A few of these pictures are from the Gateway Arch in St Louis. When I was growing up, my family travelled to Denver, Colorado often. It was a two day car trip. One of the things I remember about all those trips is my dad pointing out the Arch. Every time, he would say “You know, you can go up inside that thing and look out the very top.”
So thirty years later, I took my kids inside that thing and we looked out the very top. It was worth the wait.
Bible Tuesday – Revelation Part 6
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“Turn back! Recover your dear early love. No time to waste, for I’m well on my way to removing your light from the golden circle.
Revelation 2:5
God always has an easy answer. To the Ephesians who had lost their ‘first love’, He says “Turn back!” (I love that there is an exclamation mark. Who knew punctuation could be so inspiring?) This simple advice is the same basic message God has been giving His people since forever. “Turn back!” I think the simplicity is why we so often screw it up. We want it to be harder. We are so scared of grace that we cannot accept it. Not to step on any toes here but I think this is an area of Catholicism that is appealing to most people. Confess to a priest. Do the ‘penance’ they require and then be done with it. But look ya’ll. You can say Hail Marys until your face falls off and you still won’t be right with God. Just accept the fact that you screwed up again and stop. Then try again and hopefully leave out the screwing up part. Repeat for the rest of your stinkin’ life.
“You do have this to your credit: You hate the Nicolaitan business. I hate it, too.
Revelation 2:6
What the what?!?!? I normally like to let scripture speak for itself but this deal required a bit of research. I was actually surprised that even Google could not give me a really definitive answer. (There were 22, 150 results though which,from what I can gather, are just a bunch of bloggers pretending they know.) The best I can deduce is that the Nicolaitians were a group guilty of idolatry and fornication. There is not a lot of agreement about this. But the other theories I read were wildly divergent and quite frankly, a little bit goofy. Feel free to research this on your own but consider yourself warned. 75% of what is written out there is pure drivel. Apply your most jaundiced eye to anyone who claims that their interpretation is the only ‘true’ answer. For my purpose here, I am not so much interested in what the Nicolaitians did but in how Jesus reacts to it.
Do you think Jesus is just a ‘big picture’ kinda God? Have you deceived yourself into believing that he doesn’t concern himself with your ‘business’?
Do you have some business going on at your church? Your workplace? Your home? Of course you do. We all do. Jesus knows all about it and, even better (or worse depending), is that He knows how you feel about it. You know, your real reaction to things. Not that fake smile that we plaster on so nobody gets their feelings hurt.
Don’t miss the important part here. Jesus hates the ‘business’. He doesn’t hate the Nicolaitians.
Glutton – Part 27
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Can we talk about regaining for a bit? I haven’t lost enough weight yet to regain any. It’s just something I need to address.
I can’t watch “The Biggest Loser” anymore. I used to love that show. It shamed and inspired me. An odd combination to be sure but I loved it. After a few seasons though, I started to feel as if it perpetuated every myth people believe about the obese. Because the show basically proved that if you just got your fat butt off the couch and exercised for three hours a day and ate Jennie O lean turkey meat, you too could lose 127 pounds in just 12 weeks. Right? And clearly those fatties really needed a trainer to yell at them until they cried. You gotta break ’em to build ’em. Amirite? And even though they talked incessantly about good nutrition, that never stopped them from having a challenge to see how many doughnuts the contestants would eat for a certain reward. And then (my favorite part) the trainers get to berate whichever poor soul actually did eat the doughnuts. “How could you?” they would shriek. Just once, I wanted one of the contestants to shake that doughnut in someone’s face and shout “How could YOU!?!?”
As the seasons began to pass, something happened. One by one, past contestants started to regain the weight. Now this, in itself, is no big surprise. A huge percentage of people who lose lots of weight do regain it. You can’t actually blame that on the tv show.
Then the 2006 winner, Erik Chopin, went public with his own weight gain. The winner. The guy who saw all the medical evidence about how his weight was killing him. The guy who bounded up to the big scale in his official Biggest Loser tank top and compression shorts while confetti rained down on him and his wife cried happy tears in the audience. That guy gained it all back. He owned a deli in the town where he lived. How often,as he was regaining, do you think people came in and just stared? Whispered behind his back? Made concerned phone calls to his wife or mom? Flat out asked him in front of God and everybody? How much shame do you think Erik endured every day? And then, when the show called to do a ‘Where are they now?” feature, he did something crazy. He answered the dang phone! That’s the bravest thing I have ever heard. If that had been me, I would have moved to another country and changed my name to Wutang Margarita Smith.
You know why Erik ansered the phone? Beacuse he was desperate. And desperation almost always trumps shame.
I don’t blame the tv show for Erik’s weight problems. (Ok, I blame them a little bit.) Mostly I blame a weight loss mindset that never addresses addiction. And by that I do not mean “Well you are addicted to food so I guess you will be obese permanently and die young.” What I long for is that someone would get real and say “You are always going to struggle with food. Every day of your life is going to be a balance between freedom and dependence. And twelve weeks on a ranch is just the tip of this gluttony iceberg.”
In case you think I am unfairly singling out this one show, next week we will talk about Ruby.
