The Pharisee in ME

Have you ever been the recipient of a judgmental, Pharisee attack? Perhaps a better question is, ‘Have you ever been one who was judgmental and pharisaical?

This incident happened at Loyola University in New Orleans in the summer of 1981 and comes from the book Ragmuffin Gospel, by Brennan Manning:
Dr. Meghan McKenna was lecturing on the New Testament milieu in which Jesus' ministry began. The four Prominent religious groups were the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and Essenes. The Pharisees separated themselves from everyone who was not faithful to the law and the traditions, in order to form a closed community. Their name means ‘the separate ones.’… They believed that God loved and rewarded the ones who kept the law and hated and punished those who did not.

The sinners were the social outcasts. Anyone who for any reason deviated from the law and the customs of the middle class was treated as inferior, as low class.
When the lecture ended, Dr. McKenna suggested: ‘Let’s do a little exercise right here in the classroom. Would all those who do not smoke stand up, walk to the left and stand by the wall. And reformed smokers stand in the center of the room. Those who still smoke from a group on the right.

Thirty of the professionals had never smoked, twelve were reformed and three were active smokers. “At that time,’ (a lady named) Roslyn said, ‘I belonged to the latter group on the right.’

‘Let’s discuss two questions,’ Mekenna said. ‘First, how do you feel about the current smoking regulations on campus, in restaurants, airports, the corporate world, and so forth?"

All three groups unanimously agreed that the regulations were good, ecologically important, and sensitive to the health and welfare of others.

'The second question: How do you feel about smokers personally?’
‘They are disgusting and inconsiderate,’ said one nonsmoker.
‘Obviously anyone who smokes has low self-esteem and a lousy self-image,’ voiced another. 'They have no will power.’ ‘Rotten role models for teenagers.’ ‘I have serious questions about the quality of their faith and depth of their personal relationship with Christ.’ ‘Don't they know they are poisoning the atmosphere?’

Roslyn remarked: ‘I cowered against the far wall feeling like the woman caught in adultery. Suddenly the environment was so hostile. For the past four years of graduate school, I had prayed, worshiped, gone on picnics, taken coffee breaks, studied, and conversed with these people. I felt a deep sense bonding because of our shared life and ministry. The reformed smokers were much more understanding because they had been there-the place of addiction. At first, I was angry. When the inner rage finally subsided, I wanted to weep. I have never felt so alone.’

The bell sounded and class ended. We filed out of the room in silence. The next day Dr. McKenna, following her usual proce­dure, asked her students to share their feelings and reactions to the exercise of the previous day.

‘Yesterday I learned something about myself,’ said the woman who had made the harshest and most judgmental comments during the exercise. ‘I need a lot more compassion for people who are different than myself.’

‘How did you feel yesterday, Roslyn?’ inquired Dr. McKenna.

‘When I was standing against the wall, I actually thought the group #1 people would have thrown stones at us were they available. I realize how difficult it was for me to look at them and say, ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’

Soul Survivor

Over the last year I read a book titled Deep Survival. It is not a Christian book but I read it during a time in my life when I was struggling to “survive.” The book was about people who survived in the wilderness or survived plane crashes and the lessons that one could learn from them. It dealt with the question, why did this person survive and that one didn’t?

What lessons came out of that study? Here are a few:
· Survivors turn anger and fear into focus – they get their attention on the matter at hand.
· Survivors perceive their situation correctly, make a plan, take correct action and when confronted with a changing environment, readily adapt.
· Survivors learned to use humor and laughter. Laughter stimulates an area of the brain that helps us temper negative emotions. This helps us manage fear.
· The survivor expects the world to keep changing and is asking the question: “What’s up?” Many times the world around us is changing and we are not taking in the new information. A survivor attends to the business of adapting to the changes in the environment and keeps themselves in balance.
· Survivors maintained a positive mental attitude – One survivor said: “Think good thoughts and you’ll be saved.” Many who died had apathy. Apathy led to complete deterioration.
· Helping someone else also enabled survivors to survive. Helping others takes you out of yourself and rise above your fears.
· The survivor made plans by setting small, manageable goals.
· Survival involves being familiar with pain. Another survivor wrote: “You have to practice hurting. There is no question about it … you have to learn a bunch of junk and accept it with a sense of humor.”
· Faith also played an important role in survival. It was discovered that survivors spent their lives building a core of strength that they pulled from in the moment of struggle.

I know that in the course of life we want to do more than just survive. I want to thrive. Yet, there are places where the journey we walk takes us into deep valleys. If we have been building up a core strength in our Lord and growing in Him, we will discover that we can not only survive, but thrive in the midst of the darkness.

Web Site research

From: the things I researched from other web sites comes this one:

Things to consider . . .
Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?
If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?
When someone asks you, "A penny for your thoughts," and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?
Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?
Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It's just stale bread to begin with.
When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?
Why are a wise man and a wise guy opposites?
Why isn't 11 pronounced onety-one?
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked and dry cleaners depressed?
Do Roman paramedics refer to IV's as "4's"?
Why is it that if someone tells you that there are 1 billion stars in the universe you will believe them, but if they tell you a wall has wet paint you will have to touch it to be sure?
And finally . . . What's in a name?
That's the question being posed to readers of the trade publication The Bookseller. Those readers are being invited to vote for the annual Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year. Nominees were proposed by publishers, booksellers and librarians.
The nominees are:
~ Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan
~ How Green Were the Nazis?
~ D. Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry -- An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans
~ The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
~ Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium
~ Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
Last year's winner was People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It by Gary Leon Hill. The competition has been running since 1978, when the winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice

Failing Forward

Have there ever been times when you felt like a failure? It seemed that all you did and tried came to naught. Friends misunderstood you. You even began to question yourself. Life gets hard at times. How do you handle this?

Some escape in a sea of action like sports, hunting, work, and other hobbies. Others escape in alcohol, drugs and overeating. The key word is “escape.” We feel the need to “get away” from ourselves. Yet, everywhere we turn, there we are {as some bright child once said!}. You cannot escape you.

How do we deal with the hard stuff of life? Isaiah wrote: "But I said, 'I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing. Yet what is due me is in the LORD's hand, and my reward is with my God.'" Isaiah 49:4 NIV

Isaiah expresses our feelings. He had worked and nothing was accomplished, nothing got better. He is worn out. His strength is spent. He has discovered how weak he has become. The Lord told Paul: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2 Corinthians 12:9 NIV

Now notice the other thing Isaiah tells us: Yet what is due me is in the LORD's hand, and my reward is with my God. Here is the place where we decide if we really believe this. Do I really know that what is due me is in the Lord’s hand and not in mine? Do I trust Him with the results of my labor and not look at my expectations?

We deal with the hard stuff of life by trusting in Jesus and not in ourselves or others. We do not seek to escape, we seek to learn and understand GOD in the midst of the trial. We may never grasp why we have walked the journey we are on. Letting the results be in God’s hand is freeing. Through this freedom healing will eventually come. “Experientially, the inner healing of the heart is seldom a sudden catharsis or an instant liberation…More often it is a gentle growing oneness with the Crucified who has achieved our peace through His blood on the Cross.” Brennan Manning; in The Rabbi’s Heartbeat; page 54

Mike Yankoski expresses a prayer that helps us walk this path: “Lord, thank you for taking terrible circumstances and turning them into amazing gifts…Move my heart to be truly generous with what you have given me.”