Populie: In Our Best Interest … July 23, 2014

 Jonathots Daily Blog

(2300)

The young congressman sat in his chair, completely confident in his pre-prepared answers and the stump speech that had provided him both election and platform to be the pundit of honor on the broadcast.

The question posed was simple. “Is it in our best interest to…?”

Then the interviewer offered a series of global flare-ups, hot spots and dangers in the world.

No specifics or ideas were offered by the politician, but a resounding repetition of a theme.

“We are America. We must think about America. We must take care of America. And we must be careful not to have our greatness diminished or tarnished by these difficulties. Yes, it’s popular. “America is great.”

But in the pursuit of that idea we have inserted a lie–America is better than other countries.

Religion loves this populie because it enables us to preach a gospel from a position of certainty and piety and send missionaries to the rest of the world because of their heathen status.

Entertainment has always adored “in our best interest” because it enables us to portray our great nation as the savior of all humankind.

And of course, politics adores the notion by bloating the voting block with over-wrought notions of superiority, causing them to “gloat on their way to the vote.”

Here’s the truth: 25,000 miles. That’s the entire circumference of our globe. It’s not much, when you consider that 3,000 of that is the continental United States.

With the addition of Internet, air travel and all sorts of technological surprises, we’re nearly sitting on top of each other.

Our smog floats to China, as does theirs to us.

We need to engage a simpler philosophy about our responsibility to one another other than looking at the bottom line or our cultural imperialism to determine when we’re going to be involved.

I have arrived at a rudimentary three-step process in ascertaining who I am, why I’m here, and what is expected of me if I’m going to continue to consider myself human instead of just a creature fighting for survival.

These are the three questions and my answers:

1. Who is God?

He is my Father. Any other answer to that question either diminishes the love of our Creator, eliminates His existence or generates such mystery that we’re involved in a theological paradox.

2. Who am I?

I am a child of God. I select to be a child, but not because I’m immature or untested. I select to be a child because in so proclaiming myself to be one, I admit that I am still a student of the planet and in the classroom of understanding myself and others.

3. Who is everybody else?

They are my brothers and sisters. When I start putting too many names on the human beings that surround me in this world, I become convinced that our relationships are complicated with twists and turns of culture and preference. The humans on this planet are my brothers and sisters. If we’re not linked by family genetics, we are linked to the genetics of our Creator.

Now, you might find this little trio of ideas to be very elementary in a world where we constantly hound one another with more questions than answers.

But if you begin your life by knowing that God is your Father, that you are a child of His desire and that everybody around you is brothers and sisters, the decision-making process of what is in your best interest clears up very quickly.

If I were involved in the present situations, I would realize that as a child of God, with brothers and sisters all over the world, my job is to assist and avoid killing.

Any chance we have to assist in a creative way eliminates some of the death toll.

Every gun we send over to a foreign power passes on the impression that we’ve picked sides. That means that a gun will eventually be pointed back in our direction.

I am not a pacifist unless by that term you are referring to someone who seeks peace. I am a realist.

And no man or woman that I kill in the pursuit of our best interest is going to go unnoticed by the children that he or she has left behind.

Answer the three questions.

If you’re an agnostic or atheist, you don’t believe there is a God, so you can’t be a child of God, and the human beings on the planet often tend to be your competitors.

If you’re overly religious, you don’t believe that God is your Father, but instead, a Force–often of punishment–so you feel that you’re a depraved sinner, and therefore you project that inadequacy on everyone around you.

God is my Father.

I am a child of God.

You are my brother or my sister.

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

Click here to get info on the “Gospel According to Common Sense” Tour

Please contact Jonathan’s agent, Jackie Barnett, at (615) 481-1474, for information about scheduling SpiriTed in 2014.

Click here to listen to Spirited music

 

 

The Rule of Croak … March 31, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog  

(2191)

If you want to be effective, start affecting what you can affect–or become a freak by freaking out about what you consider freaky.

The rule of croak–it’s very simple:

If it goes on after I die, I will stop worrying about it while I live.

I have sons with wives and I have grandchildren. They have lives of their own and will do just fine after I escape this mortal portal. All that will be left of me is a memory, so I should be about the business of making memories.

I know it is popular to believe that life is hard. I suppose if you decide to complicate it by involving yourself in matters that do not directly pertain to your field of activity and scope of influence…well, perhaps it becomes twisted.

But it is elementary when you school yourself on your field of expertise and you know exactly what makes you unique to life as we know it.

• My family will go on without me.
• The Dow Jones will not lose a point upon hearing of my death.
• CNN and FOX News will have no controversy concerning my demise.

What will be affected are my writings, my music, my traveling, my heart, my humor, my ideas, my wit, my whimsy, and probably my business partner, who’s been working with me for eighteen years and may notice for a season that the “oom-pah” of her life has lost some “oom.”

So since this is directly in my field of play, it is what I will pursue.

It reminds me of the time when someone asked me if I wanted to play hardball or softball. When I examined the two balls, I saw that both would be rather hard if they hit you. What makes softball more pleasing is that it is pitched your way underhanded, it’s slower and it’s bigger, and therefore easier to hit.

There you go.

The rule of croak is like the game of softball–finding the pitches that come your way, keeping your eye on that big ball and doing your best to hit it out of the park.

True pride and vanity is any notion that we have power, influence or even consideration in any matters other than those directly linked to us.

I reject that vanity.

So to my children, friends, the US government and the rest of Planet Earth, let me tell you that I will give you a blessing–and myself one as well:

I will stay out of your business unless I know I have something that will help, and I will focus on what I can do and keep doing it better and better … until I’m no longer allowed to hop around.

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

Click here to get info on the “Gospel According to Common Sense” Tour

Please contact Jonathan’s agent, Jackie Barnett, at (615) 481-1474, for information about scheduling SpiriTed in 2014.

Bounce … May 3, 2013

(1,870)

Keeping it simple.

The purpose for such an action is not because I think I’m stupid or other people are ignorant, but rather, that complexity rarely brings about greater productivity. So let’s look at it logically:

I have a heart–emotions. I need to let them feel.

I have a soul. My soul is supposed to remind me of better things.

I have a brain. My brain is intended to be used for learning.

And I have a body, with strength, which always works better when I am in motion–doing

So my heart feels, my soul reminds me, my brain learns, and my body enacts. Pretty elementary, yet often is ignored. But what we may not realize is that each one of these parts of our being has a bounce position.

In other words, the human emotions are not meant to just feel. We all know people who feel things very strongly, who are not healthy at all, but rather, imbalanced. So the bounce position for emotions–after we’ve given them a good dose of feeling–is listening. I’m talking about empathetic, compassionate hearing of the needs, wants and desires of others. This is the relaxed position for our hearts when we’ve overindulged in feeling. We need the sensation of listening. People who do not listen and only feel end up distraught.

Likewise, even though the soul reminds us, no one actually grows spiritually without pursuing the bounce position of sharing. In other words, if God is speaking to us and we’re merely retaining the information instead of sharing it, putting it into practice or sending up a test balloon to confirm our findings, we will quickly forget the lesson and end up being obnoxiously stubborn. Yes, the bounce position from being reminded in our soul is sharing from it.

And even though the mind is pre-conditioned to learn, it requires a good bounce, when we go into our old files and replace them. Case in point: the reason prejudice continues in the US to this day is that although we have learned that it’s wrong, we have not gone inside our mental files to update what pumps out when we meet somebody of a different ethnicity or lifestyle. So in a sense, we’re nervously open to each other, and the nerves can’t go away until we replace the old information in our upbringing with new knowledge that supersedes it.

And in our bodies, although it is important to remain in motion, the “bouncer” is to be just as adept at resting as we are at working. We should learn to work efficiently but also to use our down time to recuperate instead of festering in nervous energy, which prohibits us from finding solace.

You see? Human beings are beautifully balanced between these great bounces.

• Emotionally we feel, but we also listen.
• In our soul, we are reminded of what is right but we find a way to share it in order to make it a part of us instead of just a theology.
• Our brains learn, but then take the additional step of replacing old attitudes with new revelations.
• And even though we desire to be extremely productive in what our bodies do, we require the alternative blessing of being equally as intuitive in our seasons of rest.

If you focus on any one of these things over another, you experience some sort of rebounding difficulty, which will leave you teetering on sensations of inadequacy which flare up in pride.

So just like a red rubber ball, all of this comes bouncing back to you. Find your bounce. Find your balance.

And in the process, find the beauty that God intended in His last creation … human beings.

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

*****

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