If I'm going to call myself the Cynical Christian, then it's high time I get cynical here. (Walk away, eat some potato salad, make a cup of tea and still not feeling cynical). Thoughts flying in and out of brain.
Ooh, how about this? I can't even watch the news anymore. Not because the news is so bad, but because the media is so BAAADDDDDDDDD. Does any reporter even check facts anymore? Does any listener ever wonder about the stories they hear? I thought the job of a journalist was to research a story and then report to the public on it. Not anymore. Now most media outlets appear to be owned by the government. Beware the government-media complex. (Not my line, just quoting.) Their job seems to be threefold: Cover up the truth, rile up the public and sway them to the left before any facts have been reported.
The so-called prez can apparently do whatever he wants without any negative coverage. X number of vacations and countless impeachable acts and not one word from the media. The Socialist States of America. But how much did you hear about the prominent U.S. defense expert found dead under extremely suspicious circumstances? Or who the president's radical friends are, and how many of them he has surrounded himself with in DC. Why hasn't the Ft Hood radical Muslim who shot so many of his military colleagues been prosecuted?
We're living in exceptionally strange times, watching our freedoms crash and burn, as our lives become highly regulated and more dangerous by the day. And because everything is instantly available, we get to watch it in real time. Oh joy.
I may have to rename myself - I'd rather be amusing than cynical. Being a cynic is too depressing.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
God was celebrated in popular music
So, back to the days when I lived in North Danville and the general St. Johnsbury area...life was good! Music was even better. I just can't even explain how much better the music was; though most people already get it. One of the cool things was that you could hear Procol Harem one minute, and Crystal Gayle the next. Merle Haggard was played alongside the Beatles. Music was a vast mix and creativity was at an all time high - no pun intended.
I thought it would be fun to look into the fact that singers/song writers / bands often spoke from a Christian viewpoint and were not afraid to mention God. It wasn't a particularly popular view - well, there were the "Jesus Freaks" - young people who were doing sort of a hippies love God revival, but (this is the IMPORTANT part) it wasn't a particularly unpopular view either. The United States has lost its civility toward God. Oh, we can be civil towards everything BUT God. But I digress. A little. I remember in Vermont, dancing at the American Legion dances with twenty-somethings alongside sixty-somethings and all ages in between and to either side. There would be young kids and elderly people - all having a great time dancing to the bands.
So here are just a few of the songs from that time that 1) got air play and 2) sold millions of records and 3) talked about God:
Edwin Hawkins Singers "O Happy Day"(When Jesus Walked) 1969 Hit
Cat Stevens "Morning Has Broken" A beautiful old hymn
Peter, Paul and Mary "Very Last Day" Listen to this on Youtube - it gives me CHILLS
The Hollies also did "Very Last Day"
The Byrds "Turn, Turn, Turn" straight out of Ecclesiastes
Tommy James and the Shondells - "Sweet Cherry Wine" It isn't too far a stretch to think this might have been about communion! Love's the only way, drink it with your brother, pass it all around. Well, maybe not, but it was definitely about loving one another. And a good song.
The Hollies "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" - again, about loving and taking care of each other
The Searchers "Needles and Pins" has the line "..get down on my knees and pray"
And the number one song in the UK in 1970, my personal favorite: Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky". I LOVED this SONG. Still do, even though doctrinally, I take umbrage with him singing, ..."never been a sinner, I never sinned". Who's he kidding?
God was preparing me with all this music to accept His Son as my personal savior about 4 years later...God is Love.
I thought it would be fun to look into the fact that singers/song writers / bands often spoke from a Christian viewpoint and were not afraid to mention God. It wasn't a particularly popular view - well, there were the "Jesus Freaks" - young people who were doing sort of a hippies love God revival, but (this is the IMPORTANT part) it wasn't a particularly unpopular view either. The United States has lost its civility toward God. Oh, we can be civil towards everything BUT God. But I digress. A little. I remember in Vermont, dancing at the American Legion dances with twenty-somethings alongside sixty-somethings and all ages in between and to either side. There would be young kids and elderly people - all having a great time dancing to the bands.
So here are just a few of the songs from that time that 1) got air play and 2) sold millions of records and 3) talked about God:
Edwin Hawkins Singers "O Happy Day"(When Jesus Walked) 1969 Hit
Cat Stevens "Morning Has Broken" A beautiful old hymn
Peter, Paul and Mary "Very Last Day" Listen to this on Youtube - it gives me CHILLS
The Hollies also did "Very Last Day"
The Byrds "Turn, Turn, Turn" straight out of Ecclesiastes
Tommy James and the Shondells - "Sweet Cherry Wine" It isn't too far a stretch to think this might have been about communion! Love's the only way, drink it with your brother, pass it all around. Well, maybe not, but it was definitely about loving one another. And a good song.
The Hollies "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" - again, about loving and taking care of each other
The Searchers "Needles and Pins" has the line "..get down on my knees and pray"
And the number one song in the UK in 1970, my personal favorite: Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky". I LOVED this SONG. Still do, even though doctrinally, I take umbrage with him singing, ..."never been a sinner, I never sinned". Who's he kidding?
God was preparing me with all this music to accept His Son as my personal savior about 4 years later...God is Love.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Embracing the World
I'm just the right age. I have been blessed with the most amazing perspective on technology just because of when I was born, well - that and the right attitude. I still know folks my age who hate it and refuse to enjoy anything about it. Much older and you sort of missed the bandwagon. (Yes, I'm old enough to use the word bandwagon). Much younger than I am, and you grew up in a technological world. It has sprung up incredibly quickly and has completely taken over our lives as we knew them.
When I am employed, I spend most of my day on the computer doing one thing or another. Now that I am unemployed, I'm still on the computer. I can waste hours googling obscure facts, reading news, looking for good music on youtube, checking my email, listening to Bible studies, looking for jobs, writing my book and now blogging. In case I didn't have enough to do on the computer.
When I moved to Tucson in 1993, I remember seeing someone on a huge cell phone in the grocery store, and critical person that I tend to be, thought, " Oh, for crying out loud, what the $%#@ is SO important that you have to discuss it in the canned fuit aisle?"
One could now complain all day long, because everywhere one looks, people are staring down at their phones or now just chatting away, apparently to no one, until you catch a glimpse of the bluetooth attached to their ear. You could fill a dictionary with the new terminology that accompanies all this clutter we surround ourselves with.
At some point however, you have to choose whether to surrender your serenity because of what other people are doing - when you think of it, how silly is that; or you can choose to join them, to the extent that you so desire, or must do to keep current, keep a job or whatever.
Yesterday, I found myself actually trying to remember how I filled all the hours of a day BEFORE all this stuff, and guess what? I couldn't remember!!!!! Maybe some of it will come back to me if I start writing.
When I was 18 or 19, I lived with some friends in a sugar shack in Vermont. It had been used to boil down maple sap into syrup, and then converted into a little house for which we scraped together $60 a month. There was a revolving door of people who came and went, but I think when I lived there, five of us shared expenses. So I had to come up with $12 a month rent, and then some for food and utilities.
We sometimes walked the three miles into town, we skied and snowshoed, we listened to a lot of Grateful Dead, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Poco, and we held long-running card-tournaments in the winter. We made up societies - if we were all reading, we called it a meeting of the North Danville Literary Society. One time, a friend came in the door, huffing and puffing and asking for our help as his car had slid off the road some distance away. We all suited up, grabbed all the shovels and raced to the rescue. After we dug him out, we drove around the back roads looking for others who were stuck. It must have been coming down pretty good, because we found others. We would pull up, jump out of the cars, dig the person's car out of a snowbank, jump back in our cars and drive off before he knew what had hit him. We thereafter became the North Danville Rescue Society. We embraced the world...
More random wanderings down this lane next time...
When I am employed, I spend most of my day on the computer doing one thing or another. Now that I am unemployed, I'm still on the computer. I can waste hours googling obscure facts, reading news, looking for good music on youtube, checking my email, listening to Bible studies, looking for jobs, writing my book and now blogging. In case I didn't have enough to do on the computer.
When I moved to Tucson in 1993, I remember seeing someone on a huge cell phone in the grocery store, and critical person that I tend to be, thought, " Oh, for crying out loud, what the $%#@ is SO important that you have to discuss it in the canned fuit aisle?"
One could now complain all day long, because everywhere one looks, people are staring down at their phones or now just chatting away, apparently to no one, until you catch a glimpse of the bluetooth attached to their ear. You could fill a dictionary with the new terminology that accompanies all this clutter we surround ourselves with.
At some point however, you have to choose whether to surrender your serenity because of what other people are doing - when you think of it, how silly is that; or you can choose to join them, to the extent that you so desire, or must do to keep current, keep a job or whatever.
Yesterday, I found myself actually trying to remember how I filled all the hours of a day BEFORE all this stuff, and guess what? I couldn't remember!!!!! Maybe some of it will come back to me if I start writing.
When I was 18 or 19, I lived with some friends in a sugar shack in Vermont. It had been used to boil down maple sap into syrup, and then converted into a little house for which we scraped together $60 a month. There was a revolving door of people who came and went, but I think when I lived there, five of us shared expenses. So I had to come up with $12 a month rent, and then some for food and utilities.
We sometimes walked the three miles into town, we skied and snowshoed, we listened to a lot of Grateful Dead, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Poco, and we held long-running card-tournaments in the winter. We made up societies - if we were all reading, we called it a meeting of the North Danville Literary Society. One time, a friend came in the door, huffing and puffing and asking for our help as his car had slid off the road some distance away. We all suited up, grabbed all the shovels and raced to the rescue. After we dug him out, we drove around the back roads looking for others who were stuck. It must have been coming down pretty good, because we found others. We would pull up, jump out of the cars, dig the person's car out of a snowbank, jump back in our cars and drive off before he knew what had hit him. We thereafter became the North Danville Rescue Society. We embraced the world...
More random wanderings down this lane next time...
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Post Old-Fashioned
What is post-modern? Isn't modern, by definition, well, modern? If something is post-modern, I would think it hadn't happened yet. So I'm going with post-old-fashioned, which is after old-fashioned, and therefore new, or modern. I apologize, but this is the brain God gave me and I do the best I can with it.
As a post-old-fashioned human and a woman, I struggle daily with remembering what is truly, truly important in this, our world as we know it. We're literally bombarded in all our waking hours by competition for our attention.
A few nights ago I went for a walk into Sabino Canyon at sunset. I got to see the moonlight on the water and sit by a campfire, listening to the water bubbling over the rocks. I got to look through a telescope at the full moon. I was nearly blinded (literally) by the sight of such brilliant beauty. The telescope was then turned and I was witness to the wonder of the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, an open star cluster containing middle-aged hot B-type stars located in the constellation of Taurus. It sounds like a reunion of good-looking, but older actresses of so-so movies. But it was much more spectacular than that. We then looked at Jupiter, whose bands were circling the planet vertically and whose four moons were brightly visible.
When my attention is on natural God-made wonders such as these, I am truly happy and at peace. When I focus on God's love for us (despite our nano-particle size compared to the Universe), I am overwhelmed and humbled. But all too often I find myself being critical of someone I love, or someone I barely know. I am reduced to smallness and pettiness by these thoughts. I become unhappy with myself, for I realize this thinking is not good for anything and only serves to separate me from others.
Despite my cynical nature, He loves me. As the Bible says, "we all fall short of the Glory of God..." Now, if I can just be patient and loving with myself as well as others...
As a post-old-fashioned human and a woman, I struggle daily with remembering what is truly, truly important in this, our world as we know it. We're literally bombarded in all our waking hours by competition for our attention.
A few nights ago I went for a walk into Sabino Canyon at sunset. I got to see the moonlight on the water and sit by a campfire, listening to the water bubbling over the rocks. I got to look through a telescope at the full moon. I was nearly blinded (literally) by the sight of such brilliant beauty. The telescope was then turned and I was witness to the wonder of the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, an open star cluster containing middle-aged hot B-type stars located in the constellation of Taurus. It sounds like a reunion of good-looking, but older actresses of so-so movies. But it was much more spectacular than that. We then looked at Jupiter, whose bands were circling the planet vertically and whose four moons were brightly visible.
When my attention is on natural God-made wonders such as these, I am truly happy and at peace. When I focus on God's love for us (despite our nano-particle size compared to the Universe), I am overwhelmed and humbled. But all too often I find myself being critical of someone I love, or someone I barely know. I am reduced to smallness and pettiness by these thoughts. I become unhappy with myself, for I realize this thinking is not good for anything and only serves to separate me from others.
Despite my cynical nature, He loves me. As the Bible says, "we all fall short of the Glory of God..." Now, if I can just be patient and loving with myself as well as others...
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Necessity as the mother of invention
I'm probably just going to ramble, so get used to it; welcome to MY world. Tuesday night the internet went down and the next morning, screen addict that I've become, since I couldn't check my email or look for a job or read the internet "news" headlines, I tried to turn on the TV. Evidently the little digital converter box that we were forced to buy in 2009 if we still wanted to live without cable or satellite dish had somehow fried its little brain overnight, so nothing was possible on the TV. "Hmm", I mused, "Maybe the power outage that affected a few thousand people a few blocks away made some power surge thingy that caused both of my beloved black boxes to turn belly up!"
It is now Sunday night and I still have no television. But after 50 minutes and twelve seconds (cell phones tell you EXACTLY how long you were connected) talking to a guy in the Phillipines, I actually had the internet and wireless back up and running the next day. In the interim, I have discovered that:
A) I definitely watch way too much TV. But hey, you can only look for a job so many hours per day before you can't take writing the same things over and over again on every application anymore. Why did you leave your last job? Oh, because I thought it would be fun to spend the next year semi-employed, and filling out your %$#@ job application!!!!!
B) You can watch obscure PBS shows (for instance Lark Rise to Candleford) in 10 minute increments on YouTube. Yes, I watched several episodes in order from the beginning the other day. (which is more than I can say for PBS, which will show them in order for a few weeks and then randomly start somewhere else in the series and not tell you whether you've just gone back to the beginning or what.)
C) Silence isn't so bad, but I do talk to myself more when I don't have the TV.
D) Exercise DVDs are dangerous for your health. Enough said.
E) Go without TV long enough and you may just start a blog out of sheer boredom.
It is now Sunday night and I still have no television. But after 50 minutes and twelve seconds (cell phones tell you EXACTLY how long you were connected) talking to a guy in the Phillipines, I actually had the internet and wireless back up and running the next day. In the interim, I have discovered that:
A) I definitely watch way too much TV. But hey, you can only look for a job so many hours per day before you can't take writing the same things over and over again on every application anymore. Why did you leave your last job? Oh, because I thought it would be fun to spend the next year semi-employed, and filling out your %$#@ job application!!!!!
B) You can watch obscure PBS shows (for instance Lark Rise to Candleford) in 10 minute increments on YouTube. Yes, I watched several episodes in order from the beginning the other day. (which is more than I can say for PBS, which will show them in order for a few weeks and then randomly start somewhere else in the series and not tell you whether you've just gone back to the beginning or what.)
C) Silence isn't so bad, but I do talk to myself more when I don't have the TV.
D) Exercise DVDs are dangerous for your health. Enough said.
E) Go without TV long enough and you may just start a blog out of sheer boredom.
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