Graceful Effort … May 1, 2013

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I love believing. It’s so much more fulfilling than being cynical, doubting the power of virtue and the possibilities that lie within the human family.

On the other hand, I don’t always LIKE being a believer. What I mean is, the stigma placed upon spirituality by relegating it to the status of mere “religion” often annoys me to the point of pulling out my hair (thus explaining my baldness).

What is the difference between believing and being the common believer who follows the rhetoric of religion? I think it lies somewhere in discovering the balance between grace and works.

If you’re on of those believers who thinks that “God has a wonderful plan for your life,” or that everything is written in the stars, or that the future is pre-determined and you’re just finding your place in the great scheme of destiny, you usually find yourself in a bit of despair, inept and impatient with your lot.

If you happen to be one of those individuals who is minus a spiritual direction and believe that you forge your own path with no help from a divine friend, you can also become disheartened and angry at the complexity of what you hoped would be simple.

I think it would do us good to become bird brains. For some reason or another in our pursuit of human superiority, we have deemed the bird to be stupid, when the Bible actually tells us that the birds have it figured out better than us. For instance, I woke up this morning to the sounds of chattering, singing, flying feathered folks right outside my window. I didn’t pick up any aggravation in their song; no disgruntled soul complaining about the early hour or off-key brothers and sisters. They just seemed to get it.

“We’re birds. We sing. It’s morning. Sing loudly. Sun came up. Go get worms. Bring them back to the nest. And fly around … until something kills you.”

But in our pursuit of some deep hidden meaning to life, we refuse to accept the fact that even though Jesus said we are worth “many sparrow,” he DID compare us to sparrows. You may want to believe that you, personally, are of more value than all the sparrows in the world, but in heaven your actual rate of exchange is merely MANY sparrows.

So what is the perfect balance between grace and works?

Graceful effort: pursuing what life has set in front of you, working on the excellence of your humanity, perfecting your craft, keeping a good sense of humor, while all the time understanding that this humility permits God to extend His grace to you.

God does not give grace to the prideful–and it is certainly prideful to proclaim our sanctity and purity without producing any evidence of works and effort.

So what creates humility?

1. “Like the sparrow, I will sing my song.”
2. “Like the sparrow, I will hunt my worms, knowing that they feed me.”
3. “Like the sparrow, I will build a nest and find my peace within it.”
4. “Like the sparrow, I will know that life is brief and my time, limited.”
5. “Like the sparrow, I will leave the rest to God’s grace.”

No sparrow ever dies in its nest of natural causes. Sparrows don’t get Alzheimer’s. They live their life full-throttle until their lives are no more. Often it’s a tragic end–but quick. Knowing this, they never miss a morning to sing.

Graceful effort: when I realize that life has conditions, direction and purpose, and rather than fighting it, I eagerly join in with my portion. In doing so, I humbly offer my melody to my Creator. 

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

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Please contact Jonathan’s agent, Jackie Barnett, at (615) 481-1474, for information about personal appearances or scheduling an event

The Box Created for Me … February 8, 2013

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December 18th, at Mercy Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, I arrived in this world as the fourth son of James Russell and Mary Adele Cring, weighing in at a whopping twelve and a half pounds. I was a big blob of chub.

Before I had completed taking my first breath of human air, already deposited into my being were weaknesses, strengths, predilections, inklings, chromosomal domination, DNA damage and family traits such as skin color, eye hue and even baldness.

This was my “born” identity. Every one of us has one. To ensure that this particular package of information is reinforced, we are basically surrounded for the first six years of our lives with only a handful of individuals, teaching us how to do everything from holding a spoon to the correct position for crapping. We absorb their culture. It becomes ours. And because it is ours, in our minds it is preferred above all others.

We are taught to have devotion to one set of people who have granted us this identity over, the other individuals we come into contact with who are equally as human, and maybe a more suitable blessing to our lives. I learned the manners of the Cring clan. I absorbed the fears. I heard the jokes. I retained the prejudice: “Eenie-meenie-minee-moe, catch a nigger by his toe…” (Later, arriving in school, I discovered that the more acceptable word was “tiger” instead of “nigger,” but deep in my soul I rejected it because after all, my DNA masters had taught me differently.)

These family members wasted little time trying to influence my destiny. By the time I was six weeks old, they were already guessing at my personality by the expressions on my face (which really were reactions to excess gas, but they interpreted them as personality quirks.) I became a “good baby”–or was it a “quiet little one?” Maybe I was a “real handful.” Could it be that I would be an athlete–because my legs seemed really strong when I kicked my booties off?  Aunts and uncles joined into the barrage of suggestions with their own interpretations of my unformed thinking. Entering the schoolroom made little difference–just exposed me to more ideas and more individuals who insisted that I should stay within the box created for me, and of course, coloring within the lines.

By the time I was thirteen years old, I had taken my twelve and a half pounds at birth and accelerated them to three hundred. No one intervened. Since I was playing on the football team, it was assumed that I was just “one of those big boys.” Or maybe it was because no one wanted to admit they had raised a fat kid. Who knows?

But when I left the security of this conclave of seeming protectors, I was unprepared for the world, which had little toleration for my vices and even more varied demands for my destiny.

My box was delivered into life–but it seemed to arrive postage due.

The result? I am confused. I was told that I was a Cring and everything would be all right if I just followed the household rules. And now, even my family is wondering why I just don’t seem to fit in with the rest of the world around me.

I have outgrown the box in which I was created, but I am frightened to lift the lid and escape.

My God. What’s next?

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

From the Ground Up … May 24, 2012

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I don’t pride myself on being intelligent. I have found that true intelligence lies in possessing the ability to identify your ignorance. Unfortunately, lots of folks I meet need to let the “smart” move away from their ass to their brain, with a pit stop at the soul. Yet I don’t think most people’s arrogance is a malicious act, to hurt anyone. I believe it’s because we’re all defensive over our weakness and it troubles us rather than alerting us to what our task truly needs to be.

I have told you many times in the jonathots that human beings consist of the heart (our emotions), the soul (our more spiritual side, a mind (our brain and the control center to our bodily functions) and a strength (which is the human form with all of its components and hardware).

About a week ago I had a tremendous revelation–like most such epiphanies, other people probably thought of it years ago and I just stumbled upon it on my way to the barn. May I present my thought? Each of us has one weakness. I don’t know whether it’s genetic, spiritual or part of the natural order–but it is our “cross to bear.” The question that remains is whether we’re going to climb up on that cross to crucify ourselves, or instead, whether we will create an awareness of our weakness and gear our lives in a direction to play that Achilles heel to our advantage.

My weakness is my body. I was dealt a hand of genetic mumbo-jumbo. I have heart disease and diabetes in my family. I have genetic predisposition to obesity. Apparently, it’s essential for me to be bald. Now, I knew this early on. Truthfully, realizing our weakness does not constitute victory over the situation–because the fact of the matter is, if you’re like me and have a weakness in your body, you can start feeling sorry for yourself very strongly, which drags your emotions into the pit as well. Once your emotions are swallowed up, you find very little of a spiritual dynamic for improvement, so your faith wanes. When your faith wanes, your brain takes over with doomsday proclamations, causing you to be less sharp mentally and to come across dull and uncaring. So as you can see, one weakness–in my case, a physical one–if it is not isolated, can quickly own your entire body.

It’s the difference between carrying your cross and dying on one.

Fortunately for my soul, heart and mind, I did not become defensive over having a weak body. Early on I realized that what I ate was not nearly as important for making me slender and beautiful as it was to keep me from killing myself and infiltrating the other parts of my being, which did not need to suffer from my innate weakness. With the body I have been given, I shouldn’t still be alive at sixty years of age. I applied two very simple principles to the situation:

1. Don’t fight the weakness. When you try to turn your weakness into a strength or an excuse, you miss the point. You already have three other strengths, so what you want to do is to keep your weakness from overwhelming your other parts. I have been fat all my life–but I’ve never become emotionally fat, spiritually fat or mentally a fathead. Once you stop resisting the notion that you have a weakness and resenting the hell out of it, you can actually find the power to use that weakness to your advantage.

2. Once you calm yourself down and realize that weakness is common to all of us and is what makes us part of the human family, you can start working from the ground up. For me that was easy. Since my particular cross to bear is physical, I went back to what makes the human body more profitable to its own cause–food, exercise and nutrition. It’s about eating what comes out of the ground. Everything that flowers from the earth is high in vitamins and minerals and low in fat and calories. Everything that doesn’t come out of the ground normally is high in fats and sugars and lower in nutrients. Once I understood this, I worked on my taste buds instead of developing arguments against the reality of the earth system. And because of that, I am still here today.Even though I have had occasions to overeat animal fats, sugars, salts and starches, I have certainly, over my lifetime, eaten more fruits and vegetables and things from the ground up rather than the other choices.

You have to decide where you’re coming from. If your weakness is emotions, then from the ground up you need to live a life of great humor and transparency. If you have a weakness in the spiritual realm, where the things of faith seem illogical and meaningless, then you should address that weakness by finding the most practical application in the everyday life to discover the presence of God. If your brain is your problem, then you should find the chemical imbalances or address the learning disorders, and using reasonableness and patience, attempt to “tune up” that great, fleshy computer.

If we didn’t have a weakness, we would continue to try to dominate each other, and human existence would be a stand-off instead of a fellowship. And let’s be honest–the most obnoxious people in our lives are those who believe they are strong in everything when everybody else knows their true limitation.

From birth, my body has been my adversary. It will be with me until the day I die, when it more or less becomes “dusted off.” So I spend my time using my emotions, spirit and mind to counteract the weakness in my body, providing my strength what it needs from the ground up–fruits, vegetables and everything that sprouts from the earth. (A golden nugget–if it grows in the earth, eat a lot of it. If it walks on the earth, well … more often than not, walk away from it.)

Can it really be this simple? Well, it had better be. Otherwise, none of us will ever be intelligent enough to figure it out.

 

  

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity