Randy Greenwald

Concerning Life as It Is Supposed to Be

The Second Marshmallow

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On March 13, 2011

In Uncategorized

I’m not sure how this is germane to David Brooks’ new book, or to the reviewer’s critique of it, but I find it fascinating nonetheless:

And a famous experiment conducted around 1970 demonstrated that the ability of 4-year-olds to postpone gratification by leaving a marshmallow uneaten for a time as a condition of receiving a second marshmallow was a very good predictor of success in life: “The kids who could wait a full 15 minutes had, 13 years later, SAT scores that were 210 points higher than the kids who could wait only 30 seconds. . . . Twenty years later, they had much higher college-completion rates, and 30 years later, they had much higher incomes. The kids who could not wait at all had much higher incarceration rates. They were much more likely to suffer from drug- and alcohol-addiction problems.”

I think I would have been a single marshmallow guy, no matter what the consequences.

Couch to Pooped-K

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On March 11, 2011

In Life

The trailer for a soon to be released film from one of my favorite writers, Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Up) begins with a little girl lying in bed with her mother, and she asks, “Where’s daddy?” After the mother answers, “Running,” the little girl pauses and asks, “From what?”

Great question.

Though I’ve turned “Spunky” off, her handlers told me that I was to run 25 minutes each of my three workouts this week. (I should note that no serious athlete would mistake what I do with actual running.) Today, though I trudged along at a miserably slow pace, I cranked out nearly 34 minutes and (cue the drumroll) 5.02 kilometers!

I was helped today by the soundtrack generated by the shuffle setting on my iPod. The following lyrics emerged, giving expression to the whole experience. I record below the relevant lines.

Enjoy:

“My hands are tied, my body bruised…” (U2 – “With or Without You”)

“Red eyes and fire and signs…Oh, such a prima donna, sorry for myself…” (Weepies, “Gotta Have You”)

“…I thank God that I’m alive…” (Sara Evans, “I Could Not Ask for More”)

“…time goes by so slowly…” (Leann Rimes, “Unchained Melody”)

“Maybe I might have changed and…Not been such a fool…” (Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, “From the Beginning”)

“The rugged road through barren lands, The way is dark, the road is steep…” (Alison Krauss, “A Living Prayer”)

“…you’ll catch me if ever I fall…” (Alison Krauss, “When You Say Nothing At All”)

“Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where…” (Simon and Garfunkel, “The Only Living Boy in New York”)

The final song to play was appropriate as well. It was called Arabesque #1 by Debussy, and, as we all know, the word “Arabesque” is a well know French phrase meaning “Gonna Fly Now“. (Go ahead – play the sample. You’ll recognize it…)

Close to Home

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On March 7, 2011

In Uncategorized

The church I pastor is in Seminole County, Florida. Paradise, or nearly so.

But as this segment from 60 Minutes shows, paradise is not always what it seems.

The End of the World

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On March 7, 2011

In Theology

I have grown used to Christians making generalizations lamenting the present state of life in the world, assuming a moral degradation from some idealized standard, and suggesting that such is a clear harbinger of the End of the World.

I have grown used to it. I just don’t get it. Earlier this year I read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century and if ever an era revealed End-of-the-World colors, it was the 14th century. But we are still here.

My patience wears thin, though, when the idealized standard is localized to something like the 1950s and some historic event (“…when they took prayer out of our schools…”) or another is erected as the watershed moment. Yes, THOSE 1950s when my black friends endured dental work without anesthesia and Colin Powell, later so distinguished, would drive through the south having to turn his wife into the woods to relieve herself, as they were unable to find a restroom she was free to use.

There never has been a golden age. We might even want to argue that things are so much better today than they have been at any time in the past.

But that is not my purpose. My purpose is for us to look critically at any and every era and train ourselves to see God’s providential hand of grace through it all.

In the following quote, John Frame is critiquing those critical assessments which judge contemporary life as defective because they have departed from a high and therefore pure standard. His comments are applicable as well to any effort to locate a pure golden standard anywhere in history and outside the hope of the Gospel.

So the problem is not history; the problem is sin. Culture is bad today, but Sodom and Gomorrah were probably not any better, nor were Tyre, Sidon, Ninevah, Babylon, Rome, Capernaum, or Bethsaida.

Popular culture is bad, but high culture is too. Beethoven was a devotee of the secularism of the French Revolution, Wagner of German mythology, and their music makes a powerful case for these false worldviews.. The problems of high culture go back a long way. It is not that high culture has been infected by popular culture; if anything, the reverse is true. And folk culture has always had alongside its humble virtues a lot of bawdy tales, class warfare, ignorant populism, and disrespect for the holy.

It is always wrong to try to single out one element of culture as pure, even relatively pure, and blame all of society’s ills on some other element. That is almost always self-serving: we like what we like and we want to blame the evils of life on the culture we dislike. But perhaps we need to have a more biblical view of sin. Sin is not limited to one segment of society or one segment of culture. It pervades everything. And whatever good there is comes from God’s common and special grace.

– The Doctrine of the Christian Life, Page 887.

Battle Hymn of the Earthworm Father

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On March 5, 2011

In Books

Perfect parents scare me. Honestly I consider nearly every parent beside myself to have far greater wisdom and judgment than I, and they scare me because next to their perfections my own weaknesses, mistakes, misjudgments, and oversights seem legion. I’m working on my sixth child, who is now ten, so I should know what I’m doing. But I don’t, and I never will. And standing next to perfect parents reminds me of that.

Yesterday I was struggling with parenthood. I was lamenting how hard it is and how lost I feel. I was feeling the weight of the myriad of irreversible decisions with life altering implications. Parenting offers so little margin for error, it seems, that each decision is magnified beyond proportion.

I would not trade any of the 136 years of parenting God has given me (that’s what it adds up to) nor any of the six children who have so deeply wedged themselves into my heart. But that does not mean that it is easy. If I were to write a book about parenting, the best I could do for a title would be Battle Hymn of the Earthworm Father for all the strength I bring to the matter. Tiger Mom and Dragon Father live in a different universe.

Consequently, when I can find them, it is refreshing to hang out with other parents willing to speak what it feels like to parent. Anne Lamott has been my companion recently thanks to my wife via a friend. She puts the weight of this into words which resonate with me.

Once her seven year-old son wanted to go paragliding, in tandem, with an expert, but still off a 1500 foot cliff. Perfect parents, of course, would have no second thoughts and no inner struggle. They’d know just what to do and when and how. The rest of us struggle with such things.

“What confused me, however, what how much freedom I was supposed to give Sam. I’m unclear about the fine line between good parenting and being overly protective. I get stumped by the easy test questions….”

I feel comfortable with someone willing to say that the easy questions stump her. They do me, too. The fine lines disappear for me. I don’t know the rules.

She was told that she needed to pray about the question. I identified with her here, too.

“Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me,’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.'”

Parenting often reduces me to such simplicity.

Later, when Lamott talks about her angry response when after asking her son to go without TV for a day he turned it on anyway, I realized I’d met a parenting peer.

I wish I were a perfect parent. But if I were I guess I’d look at my children as the product of my own righteousness. As it is, God continues to remind me that they are gifts of his grace, not my own competence.

Earthworm father needs to hear that.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Interesting Things

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On March 5, 2011

In Movies, Politics

A couple more items worth noting from this week’s news:

Winners or near winners of the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search have, as this article says,

…gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.

Natalie Portman is, it seems, a pretty smart gal in spite of the fact that she fell for Anakin Skywalker.

+ + + + +

To the rest of us, the political uprisings in the Middle East seem sudden and mysterious. But Thomas Friedman had some interesting observations on what lay behind these uprisings, other than the contribution of the 83 year old former Harvard professor whose booklet on toppling dictators seems to have been influential.

Among his suggestions are geeky things like Google Earth:

On Nov. 27, 2006, on the eve of parliamentary elections in Bahrain, The Washington Post ran this report from there: “Mahmood, who lives in a house with his parents, four siblings and their children, said he became even more frustrated when he looked up Bahrain on Google Earth and saw vast tracts of empty land, while tens of thousands of mainly poor Shiites were squashed together in small, dense areas. ‘We are 17 people crowded in one small house, like many people in the southern district,’ he said. ‘And you see on Google how many palaces there are and how the al-Khalifas [the Sunni ruling family] have the rest of the country to themselves.’

Read the whole. Like I said, interesting.

Couch to 4K

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On March 4, 2011

In Life

At the very real risk of boring the majority of you, some of you have asked for updates on my ‘race’ to running fitness. I know it does not seem like much to true ‘jogophiles’, but today I was able to crank out 26 minutes and 44 seconds covering just over 4 kilometers. My ‘spunky lady‘ does not let me walk anymore, so I guess I’ve graduated to the bigs. The next milestone will be the big one.

As for my running partner, his sickness gave him pause to reflect and his conclusion was that running long distances with no one chasing you was just a degree or two over the edge into Crazytown. I’m a soloist from here on in.

Let’s Be Honest

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On March 4, 2011

In Politics

Few news organizations have as many people in as many places covering as much stuff as the New York Times or National Public Radio, and so I trust them as sources of good and relevant and accurate information. And yet try as they might to be objective, and they do try, that they cannot succeed should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the strength and blindness of human bias.

Several articles in the NY Times lept out at me this past week or so as revealing this blindness. Two address the recent efforts of the majority Republican US Congress to reduce spending. One is an op-ed piece about those cuts whose headline is “The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies”. The other is an editorial headed “The War on Women”.

In both, the pro-life tilt of the Republican party is used as a foil against which to portray the party as having no compassion for children or women. They are, the author of one says, “pro-life before birth and indifferent afterward”. Their efforts to restrict federal funding of abortion services are nothing less than misogynistic.

This is, of course, no better than a conservative paper trumpeting the extension of abortion rights as “The War on Babies”. And it does not matter who is in power and who is making cuts, when budgets get cut, those cuts are made as carefully as possible to effect those with the fewest number of votes. As David Brooks pointed out, in the same publication, the problem does not lie with ideology or party, but with politicians unwilling to face their difficult task.

So, pardon me, Mr. NY Times, your biases are showing. I know these are opinion pieces. But the headlines you gave to them suggest the tilt.

Ironically, the Times this week as well ran a story about the New York City Council being incensed that crisis pregnancy centers in New York do not advertise themselves as ‘not providing medical or abortion services’, ‘tricking’ women into walking into their ‘trap’ and then feeding them loads of mis-information, contrary to honest service providers like Planned Parenthood.

Okay, I know that there are crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) whose operational practice is less than stellar. But they are rare. If I might make an observation on those that I have had the privilege of being associated with, their whole goal is to give the information that Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers are denying women. The mis-information is not on the CPC side of the street, but in the halls of the abortionist who will not provide the woman an ultrasound to see the baby’s beating heart to make sure she wants to go through with a procedure that will stop that beating heart. The ‘war on women’, rests with those like Planned Parenthood who happily support efforts to get pregnancy centers to fill their advertising with disclaimers, but staunchly oppose bills to require that THEY THEMSELVES give accurate information to the women whose abortion fees fund them.

I’m all for civility. But I treasure honest clarity as well. Not seeing a whole bunch of it here.

And finally, in the Irony of Ironies Department, Life Division, NPR ran a story this week on Republican efforts in the House to alter EPA funding. One concern is that changes in the regulatory power of the EPA will reduce the agency’s ability to control mercury emissions, a pollutant particularly dangerous, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “for young children”. To raise awareness of this danger, the Environmental Defense Fund is running a television ad stressing this danger by using footage of an ultrasound of a fetus. The same ultrasound that Planned Parenthood refuses to show their patients, unconcerned, it would seem, about an abortion’s danger for “young children”.

The human heart is incapable of impartiality. Read. But read with discernment.

Hearing the Voice

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On March 2, 2011

In Christian Life, Church

I don’t see dead people.

But I hear voices. Or, perhaps I should say, I hear ‘the Voice’.

Take your hand away from the phone. Don’t be calling the guys in the white jackets just yet.

But I’m serious. I hear the voice that we all hear. The voice that says, “That’s not really true.” I hear the voice of doubt.

I’m not saying that the Voice is audible and I’m not saying that the Voice is welcome. But I would be lying if I said that I was a stranger to the Voice.

The Voice is annoying when I’m praying. It whispers to me that praying is a waste of time, that there is no God to hear me, that to imagine him hearing and responding to the prayers of a billion people is just fantasy. I do my best to ignore it and to remember that a man once, who rose again from the dead, found that prayer was very important.

The Voice is threatening when I’m traumatized. It speaks questions to my heart challenging the claims of the love of this one whom we call God. It is quite the logical voice, speaking in propositions which begin with some variation of “If this God was real…” or “If this God really loved you….” Like Christian fleeing the city of destruction, all I can do sometimes is put my hands over my ears and try my best not to listen.

But, I confess, I sometimes am taken in. I believe the Voice. I want to believe the Voice. I want to be led beside waters of self pity and to wallow in the muddy fields of rotten luck. I give into the Voice for a time, but somehow I always emerge. Someone comes along and says, unknowingly, and in so many words, “What are you doing there?”

I long for the day when the Voice is silenced. When his threatening tones are no more. When try as I might, I won’t be able to hear. When the only voice I will hear will be that of a Good Shepherd.

But until then, I’ll still hear the Voice. I’m comforted that others have heard the Voice and persevered – Spurgeon, Luther, John the Baptist, and our patron saint, Thomas. And I’m grateful to be and to have been in churches where people are honest enough to admit that they hear and listen to the Voice. Such honesty helps me realize that the Voice has no real substance and his logic no real basis.

But still, I listen. And I grieve for those who find no outlet to admit what they hear and how they struggle. In sympathy, a man has put together an online group called Doubters Annonymous [via Justin Taylor] and this is a good and courageous thing. I’m just sad that such cannot be admitted openly in the church. I’m sad that anonymity seems necessary.

In hearing the Voice, I figure I’m in good company. Like everyone. I also know that there are answers to every question the Voice throws at me. Just sometimes I’m not in a frame of mind to hear those answers. I just need to be loved and embraced and supported.

But I also know that Jesus died and rose again. For hearers of the Voice. It’s His voice, then, that I strive to hear above the din.

And I do. But often I hear it through the means of fellow pilgrims. And for them, I’m grateful.

Little C, Big P

By

On March 1, 2011

In Movies

For those of us who need a break and don’t have a kid readily available, the following counsel is in order:

1. Block out two hours time.
2. Pop some popcorn.
3. Pull the shades, lock the door, turn off the cell phone.
4. Watch either Nanny McPhee or Nanny McPhee Returns.

The precautions in point three may seem extreme, but they are necessary. As a responsible and intellectually serious adult, you would not want anyone to catch you watching, much less enjoying, a kids’ movie without a kid present.

Fortunately, for me, I have a kid so I could dispense with step three and simply enjoy what I have found to be a couple of the most delightful and pleasing “family” movies ever.

Emma Thompson has taken stories from her childhood about a character named Nurse Matilda and crafted movies which are fantastical and magical, fun and entertaining. She has coaxed into participation top tier stars like Colin Firth and Maggie Gyllenhaal to play along with her.

The movies are not out to make a point or drive home some lesson of ‘believe in yourself’ which is the stock theme of movies made for families, making most of them nearly indigestible. Rather, Thompson captures that element that makes the best stories: playful fun.

If you are not an absolutely incorrigible curmudgeon, the movies will make you smile. And isn’t that a good thing, after all?

Oh, and if you don’t want to invoke step three, borrow a kid. He, or she, will love the movie as well.

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