Soft Intensity

It's early Sunday morning; the sun is creeping its way up shedding light on an incredible landscape. The snow blankets the ground, branches, and needles like a protective coating from the harsh reality of the strong winter winds.

The squirrels romp, the birds seem to be enjoying ariel maneuvres as the vast Northwoods displays God's creativity and care. This is a moment in time, a moment God gives us to slow down and absorb the beauty.

An artist could try and capture the moment, but only God could create such beauty. Words are inadequate and human understanding quite limited.

Everything about this moment silently displays the soft intensity of God, my Father who has given us such beautiful gifts for our pleasure.
So often the business of life robs us of this beautiful soft intensity that God displays on a regular basis.

Perhaps we all need to hit the pause button, sit with a cup of coffee/tea and enjoy the moment before going on to our ordinarily distracted lives. Those who take time to consider God, appreciate God and those who do not experience God have not taken the time to know Him or acknowledge what He has done and is doing.

God's soft intensity is a bold statement of fact. I hope your paying attention.

A Cry For Help

Our nation’s students are crying out for help. Their cry tugs at our heartstrings like that of a baby crying. We want to help, but, at times, feel helpless. As a baby is demanding something from the “old” people around them, the students are demanding something in hopes that the “old” people around them can and will do something. 

There is not a sane adult in the nation who is not moved by their cry. However, marching and making this demand is like demanding tornados to stop, hurricanes to cease, and flood waters to recede. 

If I beat my head on a rock, and then march to make the process of banging my head on a rock painless, I could have sympathy nods and agreement that I should live a pain-free life.  Someone would need to step up and tell me that the pain I am feeling is normal for someone who beats their head on a rock. 

There is a reason for the shootings in our nation’s schools, and it will not be solved by controlling guns, posting guards, or locking doors. 

If you flip through the television channels any given evening, you will see several programs focused on violence, demeaning women, and sexual confusion. Young people spend hours playing video games, viewing pornography, and investing in social media “relationships.” This generation has spent so much time in the pretend world that the real world becomes a scary and unknown place. 

In many cases, they want to hit the off switch or the reset button, but there is none. 

There is no possible way to spend many hours absorbing such things and have peace, love, hope, and more come from your life. In fact, the opposite is happening. 

This generation has learned this self-centered pretend life from the generation that went before them. The parents of today have grown up absorbing the pretend while ignoring the reality. They can spend time at home, together, and not be together. Relationships are being built on physical presence, while the mental and emotional presence is elsewhere. 

This relational disconnect is what should be protested, and it can be something that is corrected. Perhaps we should outlaw absent fathers, which seems to be a common denominator to many of the shooters. Maybe our children should march demanding that their parents invest more real time with them, rather than just physically being there and providing for their transportation, housing, food, and laundry services. 

As a former teacher, I can positively state that there is a correlation between well-balanced, confident, contributing students, and parental involvement. It is the single most crucial factor in the growth and development of a child. 

We need more teachers to demand parent-teacher conferences, and to talk to the parents about how they are doing, rather than how their students are progressing. 

Adults are consistently behaving in a way that has adverse effects on children. Our prisons are full of people who were drunk while committing a crime. Our health system is overwhelmed with people who are dealing with effects of alcohol or other drug addictions. We have a problem with obesity in our nation, and our social service servants are overwhelmed with parents who decide that drug usage trumps being with their children. 

In our nation, political correctness is king, so everyone needs to act as if we can do something, in the school, to solve the school’s problems, when the real problem has never been the school, but the home. 

We need to get back to a dad and mom (male and female) committed to God and to each other who lead our nation’s families. We need to get back to a country that is one nation, under God, instead of one nation composed of many who want to be God. 

We need to limit the pretend, and maximize reality, or we will be in danger of living in a fantasy world of our own making, and we will miss out on the reality God for which intended and equipped us. 

There is no possible way for our nation to experience positive change without change. It is time to change, and the change needs to start with every adult who has contributed to this mess in which we find ourselves.

Why Do We Need To Know?

Everyone has a private life that indeed should remain private. The idea of living lives that are entirely transparent sounds progressive, but ends up being manipulative. We want people to affirm us, and if they don’t, we shame them into it. We want God to affirm us, and if He doesn’t, we shame Him, or declare that He does not exist. We work at creating a majority opinion, and consider the majority opinion affirmation of our decisions, even though the majority’s opinion has no bearing on what is right or wrong. 

Those who worship transparency do so on the pylon of tolerance, yet they destroy the idea of tolerance by the constant casting of shame on those who disagree with them. 

A society that values good over right and tolerance over patience provides perfect conditions for evil to prosper. The word “good” needs a comparison to be understood, whereas God defines "right." The idea of tolerance means acceptance, whereas patience looks for signs of understanding, growth, and change. 

The current trend of having people declare their sexuality is a perfect example of this new manipulative norm. People feel compelled to talk in public about their personal lives and struggles. For decades, we did not ask and were not told about the sexual habits of an individual at work. If I was a welder, I needed to be able to weld and produce an appropriate product, or risk losing my job. The evaluation process was based on the work that I performed, and my respect for both the customer and those who supervised me. 

For years, I worked in a public school district that was mainly populated by Jewish teachers and students. I am a Swedish Christian. I lived my life, taught my students, helped make the other teachers around me successful, and was never threatened because of my personal life. I never walked into the school and declared that I was a Swedish Christian and demanded respect, even though I lived out what I believed. 

I do believe that Christ is the Messiah, the only way to God, and that those with whom I worked who practiced the Hebrew faith were close, but seriously mistaken. I am sure they felt the same towards me. 

We had civil discussions at times, honest inquiries, and mutual respect. I lived in a way that was consistent with what I believed, and I was ready to answer if questioned. I did not, however, run a campaign, demean my colleagues, or claim that I lacked respect because of some rather substantial disagreements. 

As a teacher, I used to ask my students what a majority opinion meant. As fifth graders, they knew that a majority opinion had nothing to do with right and wrong, even in America, but had to do with, well, the majority opinion. 

Believing something to be right has never made it right. Self-absorbed confused citizens will eventually populate a society that campaigns to make whatever an individual believes right or normal. 

Respect

I have read some news articles recently that refer to a statement that some women are making about being respected. It seems that the new buzz phrase among some is something like this: “We do not need to be modest to be respected.”

I may be old school on this, but I think that intentionally dressing immodestly and desiring respect for doing this is impossible. Respect, according to the dictionary, is “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.” When a person decides to be immodest, it is not something to admire, indeed demonstrates no ability, lacks quality, and has nothing to do with achievement.

Our culture is struggling because we seem to insist on living lives that are guided by mutually exclusive ideas. We demand respect without cause, insist on being right because we “just believe” something, and make those who disagree with us unacceptable, all while preaching tolerance.

Our children are growing up in a time where confusion reigns.

As in all matters, we need to get to the heart of the statements made concerning respect. Indeed, all people, all ages, and all races should be shown kindness, and should be able to live in a world that would love them and not use them. God created us to be relational, to love Him, and to love others. He did not create us to use Him or to use others, and when we do that, we create a troubled society.

I believe that the ladies who want to be respected, even when they dress immodestly, are not using the right concept. In theory, regardless of what someone does, we need to do what we can to help them be the best they can be, not to position ourselves to take advantage or hurt them in any way.

Personal responsibility goes both ways. No matter what situation I encounter, I need to have what is best in mind for the person or people involved.

God’s Word addresses this issue by explicitly telling women they need to dress modestly. Those who choose not to do so are going against what God has expressly warned us against, and God has good reasons to say what He says.

Because people “wear” clothes differently, it is often difficult to define modesty, and, due to this difficulty, it is often not addressed, and when it is, there are rules and regulations put in place that turn it into some legalistic formula that causes many to search and find loopholes.

I think the definition of modesty is more straightforward than we want to make it.

If someone dresses in a way that screams “Look at my body or a specific body part,” it is immodest. If someone dresses to specifically attract the opposite gender’s eyes to get them to desire them, it is immodest.

If all women dressed modestly, there would still be lustful men, men who want to use them, and they could still be objectified. Immodesty is not the cause of lewd behavior, just as porn is not the cause of lust. However, immodest dress and pornography have similar effects on a person in that it fuels what is already there, sometimes making the fires entirely out of control. Any fireman would tell you that if you limit the fuel, you will limit the fire.

We so often want to assign blame to someone or something else when the problems in life are usually ourselves. Sin is a problem. Dressing in a way that says that I do not care if someone struggles with lust is irresponsible. Thinking of using others for our pleasure is equally irresponsible.

We cannot stop killing by limiting guns, curb obesity by outlawing sugar, or have people not want to use each other by dressing modestly.

If we want to solve the problem, we need to start by admitting that we are the problem, that sin is the problem, and that we are sinners.

Knowing that is the first step, and then understanding and responding to the love of God, as demonstrated through Jesus Christ, and adjusting our thinking and living to reflect life’s purpose will solve the problem.