Rusted Sleigh Runners

As Santa heads home for a long winter's nap, Mrs. Claus may want to have some blade wax ready for him. We've had so much rain here that after today's deliveries, he'll need to tend to his sleigh runners before they rust on through.

I've learned some practical stuff about dealing with Christmas this year; in a spirit of magnanimous generosity, I will share this wisdom with all who care to keep reading:

#1 Don't choose the powdered doughnuts from the buffet if you are wearing black trousers. Confectioner's sugar has built-in sensors and short-range levitation capabilities that enable it to fly to dark colored surfaces.

#2 Some gifts are almost worse than receiving no gift at all. It is not that anything is inherently wrong with the gift per se. I certainly don't have any personal animosity against lightly scented bath soap or its companion lip gloss. The problem is that—and I will allow an exception for blind gift exchanges where you must draw numbers and don't know who the recipient might be—receiving a pre-packaged bath set from someone who knows me is like having them scream at me, "I could not care less about you! I had to go waste my precious time and money on this stupid social convention just to keep up appearances so I won't look bad." Except that it doesn't work. The giver will still come off looking like someone who has all the shallowness, the vapidity, and the insipid empathy of a Malibu Barbie doll. In other words, buying pre-packaged selections on the end-aisle display directly across from the checkout just because you "have to give a gift" will make you look like the unimaginative mindless twit that you are. A two-finger rendition of Heart & Soul would be far more impressive. At least there would be some light-hearted irony in being blown off.

#3 Christmas Eve MUST be on the night before Christmas. Our church tried to move it a day earlier to fall on Wednesday this year. I guess the staff is set up for Wednesday night services and they probably figured that holding two evening services in a row was asking too much. But it is wrong to short-sheet Christmas Eve. When half your family is employed in retail and others must come in from out-of-town, you just can't expect them to show up for a candlelight service a day early. Getting gypped out of a pleasant tradition stinks.

#4 All the effort you put into making happy memories is worth it; if not this year, then someday. When my kids were little, I wanted Christmas to be a happy time for them. Now that they are in their twenties, I am finally reaping the satisfaction of learning that I succeeded. There is something better than seeing a smile on a child's face, and that is having that adult child tell you that they remember smiling.

Christmas Skittishness

We had the annual Christmas children's pageant at church today. It was a scaled down version this year—somewhat befitting a precarious economy, congregants out of work, and the unexpected recent passing of our pastor's father. Nonetheless, it had all the requisite elements of a terrific kid's Christmas show:
It had the mumbled lines for the audience to guess at; it had the sweetheart who couldn't decide if she wanted to be onstage, and so walked off as soon as she realized she didn't know all the lyrics; it had the show-stealer who sang her Fa-la-la's at twice the decibels of everyone else; it had the kid in the back row who just had to pick his booger, (and can't you feel his mom cringing in the pew even now?); and it had the angel who, instead of a fallen halo, this year sported a broken wing. The only thing really absent, and it was absent in a good way, was the squealing feedback of a mike.

Most of all, it had heart. And in the end, it is the heart that really matters. It was fun, playful, even pushing into frivolity. Yet it still covered the essential message that God came to be with us.
And that is reason to celebrate.

Things My Sunday School Teachers Got Wrong

Kids are impressionable. Someday I would like to write a book about all the wrong impressions I got in Sunday School. The funniest one isn't my wrong impression, but I do remember the class where the teacher said it. It was the five-year-old classroom at the end of the first-floor hallway. The teacher wanted to make Jesus "more real" for us kids so she described his clothes and what he must have looked like. She told us that he probably had brown eyes and an olive complexion, like most kids who were from Nazareth.

Fast Forward seven years and I am in a seventh-grade English class assigned to write about a funny misunderstanding. I don't know what I wrote; it was probably pretty dull. But one of the other boys in the class wrote about what happened when he got home from church that day years ago. He told his mom that the teacher said Jesus was a Martian. He was quite insistent about it. (Do you know where this is going yet?) His mom called the teacher and asked what was going on. They could not figure it out at first. Finally the mom asked her son why he thought the teacher said that Jesus was a Martian. To which Mike replied, "She did, mom. She told us he had green skin." His mom called the teacher back with this new information and they finally figured out that 'olive complexion' got rewired into 'green skin.' Apparently his family had many chuckles over that.

My stories are not as humorous. My book, if it ever gets written, will be mostly about immature interpretations; a fistful of examples of where scripture was "dumbed down" for kids, with results that slid woefully off-course; and a few things that were outright lies.

At least one chapter will be based on Matthew 24:12 – Because lawlessness is increased, the love of many will grow cold.

My Sunday school teachers never passed up a chance to practice behavior modification by an appeal to conscience. According to them, this verse meant that being naughty causes you to lose your love for Jesus. That may be, but it is not the context of this verse. This verse actually merges the verboten mixing of religion and politics. It is speaking of the lawlessness of people who hold authority over others. When anyone in authority, from the beat cop to the President, acts in a lawless manner, most people start wondering, 'If God is so all-fired good, the why does He let them get away with it?" (And if I ever write my book, I'll answer that, but in the meantime I'll stick with the effect of the lawlessness.) The love of most people will grow cold as a result of the unchecked lawlessness they see around them daily.

My Sunday school teachers taught it the opposite way around. Granted, there's a vicious circle of cause and effect that hardens people once the spiral has begun; but this verse justly puts the blame on the lawlessness of corrupt authority. The next verse implies that their victims end up in hell; only those who stand firm to the end will be saved.

So, given crooked leadership, what is your responsibility?

Brightening Up a Little

"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.

"So it is."

"And freezing."

"Is it?"

"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately."

Shipwrecking Columbus

I was going to write about Columbus Day. I had a cute little graphic picked out and everything, see? But this blog is about life along the rabbit trail and exploring where it may lead. This week it led to Obama getting the Ignoble Peace Affirmation.


A contributor identified as mtlmnr49 had this to say on Yahoo!Answers:

The Nobel Prize committee clearly supports and endorses an agenda that reduces the role of the United States in the world, promotes global governance over national sovereignty, and brings about equality among nations by reducing the standard of living of prosperous nations rather than promoting economic freedom in the developing world.

When examining the records of the last three US politicians to win the Peace prize, the agenda of the committee is easily seen. Woodrow Wilson's work in subjugating national sovereignty to the League of Nations won him the prize in 1919, Jimmy Carter's 2002 Peace prize was given in support of his opposition to the US's right to defend itself without authorization from an international authority, and Al Gore won the prize for endorsing a policy that requires the Western World to lower its standard of living by up to 30% in the hopes that it will lower global temperatures by less than 1 degree over 100 years.

It was upon reading this that the rabbit trail forked away from my intended comments on Christopher Columbus's family life and toward the award.

I think that it is important for those folks who do not wish to sound foolish when commenting on this event to realize that nominations for this prize closed eleven days after Obama's inauguration. Eleven days, or twelve if you count parts of days, because the nominations closed February 1, 2009, but I can be generous—call it less than two weeks, then.

Clearly this prize was awarded, not based on verifiable actions and accomplishments, but upon what a small group of people with the power to make this decision alleged to be true.

Now I ask you, are you going to live your life and make choices that affect others as if Obama is bringing peace on earth?

Lapbooker Freebie

Spice up your homeschool with sweet apple cider, pop some corn, and decorate with colorful autumn finds! Embark on a wonderful learning adventure about this season and all that it holds. Examine how seasons change, find out what autumn is all about, discover the life cycle of pumpkins and apples, see how candy corn is made, and much more.

Pious mercy is a symptom of sin.

My great thesis for this week is:
Pious mercy is a symptom of sin.

I know, it sounds a bit off, right? Pious is good. Mercy is good. Since when do two positives make a negative?

Not in the math books, perhaps. But in real life it does in the case of pious mercy.


I posit that celerity in granting pious mercy is frequently indicative of hidden sin in the life of the grantor.

They "forgive" quickly because they do not wish to be too closely scrutinized themselves. Swept neatly under the rug. Or so they wish. It is the old 'judge not, that you be not judged' crowd.

Most folks won't venture to pray as David did in Psalm 59:5 when he implores God, "Do not be gracious to any who are treacherous in iniquity."

Why not? Is it mean to want the wicked to fail? Our cultural answer is yes, that is mean. The scriptural answer is no, that is righteous.

The remarkable thing is that there are scriptural promises of the righteous being able to laugh at the downfall of the wicked. That must take tremendous depth of maturity. Or else purity.