1 Thing You Need to Know About Perfect People … July 20th, 2020

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No One Likes Them

Years ago in my Junior High Sunday School class, I remember telling the church deacon, who was teaching us young ones, that I believed Jesus was not perfect.

My statement sucked the air out of the room.

I continued. “Jesus disobeyed his parents when he was twelve, yelled at a whole lot of people, whipped some folks in the Temple, and broke all sorts of Jewish Sabbath rules. But because he hung around and worked on his life instead of getting angry and defensive, he grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man.”

My teacher was at a loss for words. So like most people who find themselves wordless, he insisted that the last thing he said was absolutely right.

“Jesus was perfect,” he bellowed, “and in our church we declare him to be.”

To this day, I do not know why we want Jesus to be perfect.

He lived a human life.

The Good Book says he was tempted like we are, touched with our infirmities, and he was a “son of man.”

In other words, just one of us.

What I clearly need to know is, what did Jesus do when he looked at his life and felt the need to change?

The Gospels teach me that he went off by himself in the wilderness to work out his temptations.

He also chose to be baptized, like everyone else. (Please don’t tell me that he was baptized as a mere symbol, or for a pretense. Isn’t that just annoying, if not sacrilegious?)

Jesus knew that to be human he had to repent like we do, and perfect his life instead of insisting he was already perfect.

Now, that’s a dude I can follow.

Perfect people are almost always brats.

It’s mainly because they think they’re perfect.

And we know, for a fact, that they are not.

The B. S. M. G. Report

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The meek will inherit

Because they’re willing to share it

BAD

We are in the midst of severely ignoring the currency of the Christmas season.

We have begun to believe that December can be filled with our foolishness and chicanery, when during that thirty days, the Earth always takes a collective gasp for air, so that we can survive the rest of our yearly journey.

But now, we have instead decided to go politically crazy, emotionally distraught and spiritually bankrupt.

How about a simple example?

A seventeen-year-old boy decides to take the family car to a party and does some illegal drinking. Coming out, he gets behind the wheel and drives the car home, where he finds his mother and father waiting for him at the door, unable to deny his intoxication.

But let’s say that same young man went to the party, got just as drunk and drove home, but on the way to his house, crashed his car into a tree. A half-hour later, his parents arrive at the police station to retrieve him.

Just for the sake of discussion, back to that same young man, same party, same drunkenness—but this time, on the drive home he hits a young boy on a bicycle and kills him.

I present these three scenarios to you because we need to discuss some differences among the words errant, mistake and crime.

To the legalist or someone who is toeing the letter of the law, I suppose the boy who arrives home in his car intoxicated is committing a crime. But dare I say, there probably is not a mother or father in America who would view it that way.

They would recognize the behavior as “errant.” It would need to be corrected in-house.

Yet these same parents would probably not consider crashing into a tree to merely be errant. They wouldn’t call it a crime—they would say it was a mistake. Once again, punishment would be in order.

But the parents would have no say whatsoever in the matter if their son killed somebody while drunk. That would be considered by one and all to be a crime.

We have made a severe mistake by impeaching President Donald Trump.

Whether you consider what he did with Ukraine to be errant behavior, a mistake or a crime, the populace will need to sustain that opinion.

Yet what is missing is acknowledgment.

No one has admitted errant behavior or a mistake, so it begins to feel like a crime.

Here’s the question:

Did Donald Trump do something errant, make a mistake, or was it a crime?

We will probably never know—because he refuses to admit his part in the problem.

SAD

It makes me downright sad.

If you put Republicans and Democrats together, you kind of have a great world.

Republicans are all about “hometown.”

• Their lovely burgs.
• Their families.
• Their dogs.
• God’s country.

Democrats, on the other hand, are about the Earth.

• Climate change.
• Global poverty.
• Gender equality across the planet.

Doggone it, I like them all.

I’d like to take the better parts of  my hometown and spread them across the globe.

I want to treat the Earth well. So why don’t I come back to my hometown and get started?

It’s sad that we have two great forces that fight against one another instead of turning the Earth into a marvelous hometown.

MAD

But it is maddening that none of this can happen because the ability to confess our faults has diminished until it seems to have finally disappeared.

One of my favorite phrases from the Good Book is, “Confess your faults to one another so you can be healed.”

I don’t want to live in a world that is constantly misshapen, out of step, angry and frustrated simply because we think it’s weak to admit our missteps.

What a great time to come along and stand in front of your friends and proclaim your foibles without fear.

GLAD

Because you know what makes me glad?

Not even an impeachment, violence, partisan politics and hours of boring hearings on television can dim the power and spirit of Christmas.

It is in our DNA to try to give a damn in the month of December.

It’s a glorious time. And it doesn’t go away unless we chase it away.

It is bad that we cannot decide what has happened with our President.

It makes me sad that our Republicans and Democrats don’t know how perfect they would be together.

And I’m mad that we don’t confess our faults to be healed.

But I’m glad it’s December:

We’re birthing great ideas to create a “stable world.”

The E Word … March 5th, 2019

THE

WORD

 

There are words that are so vile with violence and bedeviled by bigotry that they should never be written or spoken again. But there are also words, shrouded with sinister self-righteousness, which are equally poisoned.

Such is the case with our E word this week:

EXCEPTIONAL

From the Greeks feeling philosophically elevated to the Romans commanding allegiance through their powerful armies, to the Jews believing they were “the Chosen Ones,” to the touting of a Holy Roman Empire, there have always been cultures, races and faiths that have attempted to establish their dominance over fellow-humans.

I must be candid. My skin crawls whenever I hear my American brothers and sisters bolstering our national ego by referring to the United States as “exceptional.” It is the kind of blatant arrogance that made us pursue “manifest destiny,” stealing land from a native people, while simultaneously shipping in souls from Africa to become our slaves.

It is evil—not just because it is pompous and misrepresents reality, but because it works hand in hand with two other failing thoughts.

For you see, people who think they are exceptional eventually believe they are superior. And those who proclaim they are superior eventually insist they are supreme.

After World War I, the German people were devastated in morale and financially destitute. A little man came with a huge idea. He told the German people they didn’t need to be the doormat of the world. He raised the consciousness of their Germanic roots. He told them they were exceptional.

In doing so, he stirred the pride of the nation. They began to rebuild.

Once they contended that they were exceptional, the evil little fellow then told them that they were superior.

He gave them a common enemy. By the end of the 1930’s, nearly every German, in some capacity, believed that he or she was superior to a Jew.

But to go to war, the small man, who in the meantime had become their dictator, needed to convince them they were supreme—a Super Race. This became something worth dying for—at least tens of thousands of them believed so. Unfortunately, it was not a suicide mission, but also took the lives of hundreds of thousands of other people who had to break the hypnotic spell.

Yet I will tell you, preaching “exceptionalism” is not different just because it is hatched in America. The notion is already beginning to make us contend that certain individuals are superior to others, and if we’re not careful, we will start reacting as if we are supreme.

Exceptional is a word that not even God will use. The Good Book makes it clear that He is no “respecter of persons.” If God makes no distinctions among His creation, why in the hell do we think we can?

“Exceptional” is our E word—a misguided attempt to build patriotism or national pride by ignoring the beauty of commonality and the glory of “peace on Earth, good will toward men.”

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Jonathots … January 29th, 2019

 

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It’s touching.

I’m touched.

Touch me.

From the minute we plop out of the womb, we scream—not for food, not sight, or to hear comforting words—and not to smell chocolate chip cookies.

We scream for connection.

Goddamn it—put me back against my mother’s skin. Let me feel some touch.

Then society, our educational system, religious training and our entertainment industry attempt to make us overly dependent on what we merely see and hear.

Touch is removed except for obvious situations, when we require intimacy.

We are told that touch is dangerous. You can contract diseases. You can over-commit your emotions.

Therefore, we reserve touch and withhold it. Matter of fact, when we even hear the word touch, we associate it with sexuality instead of humanity.

Some ideas persist:

Shaking hands, for instance. But we’re changing that to a fast fist-bump.

Holding hands. Isn’t a high-five enough?

A pat on the back. “Come on! You know I support you.”

There’s a national pastime to make things that draw us closer together seem unnatural. As a result, we cloister into smaller and smaller units, only allowing for fellowship in the catacombs of our own understanding.

I see you. I see what you’re doing. I want to let you know I appreciate it. I touch you.

I hear you. I love the sound. It makes me what to touch you.

I smell your human odor—your fragrance. Yes, I wouldn’t mind being close.

And certainly, I taste you. We are intimate. It makes me yearn to caress you.

It is impossible to foster human progress without touch.

Even as we argue about people coming to our country from other nations, is it not possible for us to honor those who emigrate while still being careful about their immigration? Can’t we be touched by their journey, and still ask them to stand in line and fill out an application? Why must we portray them as evil, nasty, rotten and devious?

When you remove touch, you hamper the hands, and when the hands retreat, the ability to assist evaporates.

Being touched is not a feminine thing, nor is it a masculine no-no. It is the only way that we’re sure we’re alive…and it means something.

 

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Jonathots … January 22nd, 2019

 

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Thinking that something which is not real is going to happen is called crazy.

Believing that something that is not real is going to happen is called faith.

Faith and crazy have a lot in common.

This is why, over the centuries, many who thought they were moving in faith ended up looking crazy—and there were those deemed crazy who historically are proclaimed people of faith.

The difference between faith and crazy is what energizes them.

Crazy is energized by fear—fear of rejection, fear of the future, fear of other human beings, or fear of responsibility.

Faith works by love—an appreciation for opportunity, a deep respect for other humans, and a desire to take what is given and work with it.

So how do I know I have the hands of faith instead of the mitts of crazy?

It’s the energy that comes off me, which will tell you whether I’m being controlled by fear or motivated by love.

There’s a story in the Good Book which says a woman touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was healed because “virtue came forth from him.” There was so much energy of love, hope and faith that it literally radiated from him into her body.

Sounds a little weird, doesn’t it? But we actually refer to it all the time:

• “I pick up a good vibe from you.”
• “You have a great aura.”
• “When you’re in the room, I feel like everything is possible.”
• “You make things pleasant.”
• “You make things work.”
• “You help me believe.”

The power of touch includes the ability to generate the energy of love, which is able to be transferred from one person to another.

Yes—we can infuse our authority and power into another human being.

Yes—faith and love can be passed along, just as we know that craziness and fear can ricochet through mob, turning them into killers.

I’m on a journey to make sure that my faith is not crazy by confirming every day that it is fed by love instead of fear.

 

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1 Thing You Can Do This Week (To Become a Better Communicator)

Don’t Quote From the Bible

Or Shakespeare, for that matter.

You might want to avoid constantly popping off with lines from old movies.

And nobody’s that interested in what your grandmother once said.

Human beings are just adverse to verse.

Along with coming across pious, self-righteous and intimidating, it leaves the listeners feeling ignorant if they’re not aware of the reference or fail to measure up to the content.

The Good Book even warns that “the letter kills.” In other words, quoting the Bible without allowing for the spirit of the idea to be included does nothing but condemn people.

HOW DO HUMANS LEARN?

Human folks do not learn by hearing lessons or even reading intelligent reports.

We imitate.

We see things we like or we view actions which have proven to be successful, and we come up with our own rendition.

Whenever you quote from the Bible, you’re not only telling people that “God has spoken,” but you’re also interpreting what God means. And the Good Book itself makes it clear that there is no private interpretation. In other words, you and I have not cornered the market on summarizing the heart of God.

This is why Jesus suggested that we “let our light shine before men, that they see our good works”–and then, from that positive experience, they can glorify the Father in Heaven.

The Bible does not encourage people to become faithful followers. You do that through the “word of your testimony.” Learn how to interact without needing to reinforce your experience with an “amen” from Almighty God.

It will turn you into a much better communicator.

 

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Click the elephant to see what he’s reading!

 

Sit Down Comedy … September 7th, 2018

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Weeds

Weeds weeds

Still grow from seeds

Grass and reeds

Don’t meet no needs

 

Look quite green

Is what I mean

Strongest bean

I ever seen

 

Pull them, son

Come on, it’s fun

But they are plenty

Much too many.

Most folks ain’t bad

More often just sad

Stop being mad

Make someone glad

 

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