News you can't use?
While traveling on a business trip, I was beset by reverberances from the news, to wit: Sen Craig and his airport men's room pickup strategies.
No, to my knowledge, no one tapped the special tap for me. Maybe it's a gender thing? But in all the airport restrooms I've visited so far, I've yet to find any of them conducive to love. Or even a quick roll in the...stall?
When I think of all the times I've innocently handed toilet paper to a fellow traveler by passing it under the stall divider... Quel innocent!
And Jesus wept
Growing up in church camps, we played "sword drills" or "bible drills" where the first person to find and recite a scripture won a freeze-pop, or whatever. Scripture memorization was interspersed between swimming and archery. My clever uncle mastered John 11:35 -- "Jesus wept" -- so he'd always have a scripture at hand.
Later in life, Jesus weeping meant a lot to me. Showed me reality, compassion, empathy. Still later, I began to wonder what else Jesus was weeping over. Jesus told us "they will know you are Christians by your love one for another." Yet rarely do I recognize Christians by their love one for another. Particularly when we judge, exclude, divide, and use him as a prop when we go to war.
I've just started a study of the Qur'an, and I'm wondering what I'll find. How much will teachings in the Book of Islam resemble the ways in which I see it being practiced?
I wonder what our world we be like if Christians actually were recognized and renowned for only one characteristic -- their love for other people. Would poverty and suffering fade? Would war be a distant memory? Would people walk up to us and say, "Wow, I'd like to be like you?"
Would Jesus still weep?
Quoting Seinfeld
The waves were higher, the current stronger, the undertow more severe than I have yet experienced.
It wasn't so much swimming as aqua-fighting.
The best moment came as I trudged up the sand to Richard, after a good, long aqua fight.
"The sea was angry, my friend," I said, "like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli."
Quoting a Seinfeld episode is a silly happiness, and we laughed all the way to the car.
