It takes a village

Love’s a crazy thing.  It can drive people to run into burning houses, it can also drive people to kill.  Enough of that though, I’m trying to lighten things up in my blogs.  People have wondered if I’m getting weird.  So I realized we can learn a lot from life in the good news, not just bad.  So I found this story, where a mother, most likely driven by love, kidnapped her 6-year old daughter from the father who had legal custody.  She was found because of smart teachers in her new hometown.

Sadly, that’s why people need to pull together, especially when it comes to the youngest in our society.  I have 2 young girls, and I would hope that if something bad happens to them, that strangers would step up and help.  Of course, the best thing a parent can do is make sure that their children have a large support group:  Family, neighbors, a church family, and a good school.  You cannot control everything that happens, but you can stack the deck. 

Even the mother who kidnapped her own daughter put her in the best school she could.  Luckily, it worked out against her.

Mending Wall, 2006

I doubt Robert Frost had this in mind in his famous poem, Mending Wall, which ends with the famous line: “”Good fences make good neighbors.”

I have the same situation in my life.  I have a strange backyard because the one side slopes up to my other neighbors fence, grass doesn’t grow, and there are trees.  So, I fenced in the area of my yard that can grow grass.  The unfenced area became “the wastelands” as my other neighbors nicknamed it.  My third neighbor, the one who lives behind us grew so sick of the part of my yard that wasn’t fenced in, he finally took matters in his own hands and built his own fence. 

However, he built the Berlin Wall.  It’s a 7 foot high fence, about 20 feet long, that extends from the back of my wood, picket fence to my neighbors wood, picket fence.  It doesn’t match at all and I’ve nicknamed it “The Wall” and my neighbor, Gorbachev.

However, it hasn’t driven me to shoot him. 

So what causes this? Mental illness? Frustration? Anger? Self-righteousness?  I don’t know if we’ll ever know, but probably a little of each. 

It’s ironic, in a nation with as much freedom as we have, how often we feel wronged.  Your rights versus my rights.  This feeling of “my” rights has created a danger in our society when others begin to feel abused because of other people’s rights.  Look at anti-smoking laws, political correctness, and other areas of politics and life where compromise doesn’t seem to exist.

This story goes to show that anger is a real enemy of mankind.  Look at nearly every violent event in the news.  It all stems from anger.  There isn’t a lot you can do about other people’s anger, except stay out of the way, but you can control your own anger before you end up doing something you’ll regret.  As soon as you feel that anger, you need to put yourself in check. 

If you find yourself getting angry a lot, do something to change your habits.  Books, psychologists, whatever.

Death

One of the problems of blogging is having the time to do so.  Earlier this week I did, but then my computer decided to have fun with me and freeze up, making me lose an hours worth of writing.  Four days have gone by now, and I’m finally over it.  So, to my best ability, here I am trying to recreate what was previously, a brilliant blog.

Death, tragic death, has been in the news a lot lately.  The high death toll in Iraq, floods in Texas, the school shootings in Bailey, Colorado, the Amish schoolhouse, and in Wisconsin.  In the Richmond area, we’ve had tragic murders of the Harvey family and the Baskervilles.

Death’s like these that make people seek change in society, come together as a community, and also become fearful and worry.  Didn’t you stop eating spinach during the last few months?  Have you thought about getting an alarm for you house as you heard about the rise of home invasions?  If you have teens, have you had the drug talk yet? Do you worry about your school?

If I asked you to rank “how you want to die,” no one would want to die so violently.

Similarly, the big news (and impetus for this blog) was Cory Lidle’s death as he flew into a New York City sky rise with his airplane.  In Richmond, two similar accidents happened, one at an air show in Culpepper, VA, and another in Fredericksburg, VA.  The most famous recent death similar to these deaths and my train of thought was Steve Irwin.

Again, none of these deaths are the type most people would put in their Top 10 Ways to Die.  Yet, each of these people died knowing the risks they were taking.  In fact, 1000s of people a die take part in sport or hobbies they know risk death.  For example, during college I used to go rock climbing, sometimes, climbing rock faces 1000s of feet in the air, and yes, I can probably look back at one event in which I nearly died.

In fact, I’m sure Cory Lidle and Steve Irwin were tired of hearing, “you’re gonna kill yourself doing that.”  I even heard it from my mom.

The difference I can immediately think of is that the first type of death I mentioned is mostly out of our control, and that’s what worries us.  Afterall, what do you almost always hear when a Steve Irwin or Dale Earnhardt death occurs? I even heard it mentioned in a tragic auto accident in the Richmond area last month” “At least he died doing something he loved.”

And that probably means a lot, though the end is the same.  I’d rather die in the presence of my family, than alone.  I’m sure most people do, and would prefer a “natural” death.  My wife’s grandmother died recently, slowly, in bed with her family around her.  It seemed painful, yet people still seemed comforted.

We cannot decide everything in our life, but that’s why we plan.  That’s why we plan our retirement, go to college, and have 18 month engagements.  We cannot plan our deaths, but maybe we can prepare ourselves for it no matter how it occurs: violently, accidental, or natural.  The proper planning just might make any death more bearable.

        

My first post

I guess it should come as no surprise that my first observation of the week’s news focuses on sex, or rather, the misuse of sex.  The saddest of the stories comes from Lancaster County, PA and the deaths of the 5 Amish school girls at the hands of one lone gun man. The second is more seedy, Mark Foley, and his sexually explicit IM’s to young pages in Washington, D.C.

Just think how destructive sex can be.  The man who killed the Amish girls said he did it because he had molested children while he was still a child himself, and was thinking about doing it again.  He even brought sexual lubricant to the one-room school house.  Mark Foley claims he was molested himself.  Think of all the people you know, especially the girls and women.  How many of them have been molested or raped? I bet a lot.

Sex is a beautiful thing, no doubt.  But most often, sex is handled like a gun in the hands of an inexperienced child.  Why is that? Is it because sex is a taboo subject to talk about? Is it because everything in our society has become sexualized? Is it because parents don’t parent, thus, their children look for love in other places? I’m sure it’s a combination of all that and more.

I’ve known some responsible people who have fouled up their lives for 10 minutes of fun-turned a life of disaster.  And don’t get me wrong.  Growing up, I was typical and can only now in hindsight thank my lucky stars that nothing bad happened during my indiscretions that seemed okay at the time.  It was definitely a game of Russian Roulette.

To protect us from guns, people ask for law after law to be created.  Maybe they work, maybe they don’t.  But maybe that’s why the Bible has so many laws about sex.  God knows of the dangers of sex, so he gaves us rules to live by.  Thank goodness He did.  Without these rules, we probably wouldn’t know what was right or wrong when it came to sex.  Maybe incest would be seen as normal.  Or beastiality? Today, we still look at affairs among the married as wrong.  Would we if it weren’t for the Bible.  Take it at its word or not, no other code of values has kept our viewpoint of right and wrong with sex so fixated.  

Maybe if the founding fathers knew the problems guns would create in our society, they would have rethought the 2nd Amendment.  God of course, knew what careless sex would lead to, it’s up to us to listen.  Christian or not, you cannot argue that sex inside marraige is the only responsible form of sex there is.

What this is about

Read any book, and you’re told two stories: The one you read and the one the author intended.  If you’re lucky enough, you read and understood both.  People go to bookstores every day to find new stories, sometimes for fun, research, or enlightenment.  It’s my contention that life itself has a story to tell.

In this blog, I am going to try and tell the story of life by the events that occur.  This can be in the entertainment industry, political, sports, news, the works.  This isn’t intended to a sermon to people, but God is sometimes called the Author of Life.  And as I attempt to find some truth in life, the story of life, I cannot help but think that it will be godly.  Should you not be godly, I’m sure you’ll still see truth in what I say.  If you don’t, that’s what blogs are for, so leave a comment.  Either way, I hope it provides some thought.