Sunday Thoughts

"When someone knocks on the door,

Think that he's about 

To give you something large; tell you you're forgiven,

Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,

Or that it's been decided that if you lay down no one will die."  Robert Bly, from Things to Think. Morning Poems

For most of my life, I've been told "David, you think too much."  I have never been offended by that comment. But I've never considered it to be a compliment either.   The truth is we all think too much. Brain scientists estimate that our brains make a billion billion calculations per second.  That's a lot of calculations.  I think too much and you think too much.  The difference is what we choose to think about. One thing I think about some part of every day is how small and insignificant I am.  I'm not being self effacing; it's a mathematical and  astronomical fact.  For starters, considering that the population of our planet is over seven billion people, I don't amount to very much.

Some of the things I have on my mind in the refrigerator section of Walmart:

"I live on the earth which spins in the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy is of average size in the universe. Scientists estimate that there are between 200 to 400 billion stars including our sun in the galaxy. These same scientists estimate that there are about 100 billion galaxies in the "observable universe".  So multiply 400 billion times 100 billion to estimate the number of stars in the "observable universe."  Then how many can we not see? Finally, the distance between stars is about five light years. That's about 30 trillion miles. So put all that together, the number of stars and the distance between each one.  How significant am I in the scheme of things? Did my wife tell me to get 1% or 2% milk? " 

As I'm reaching for the 2%, an activity that requires hundreds of billions of calculations,  I'm thinking,  "I hope Jarrett Stidham doesn't get hurt this season.  I would think that Auburn's season depends on him staying healthy." Now there's nothing particularly deep with thinking about college football, but I concede again that maybe it's strange to be thinking about it while making a consumer decision about milk.  But here's the thing, deciding on milk requires relatively few of my billion billion calculations, which leaves most of the billion billion available to think about something else.  I am fully capable of thinking about milk and college football at the same time.  Is that thinking too much? And at this precise moment I'm aware of my name is being called and that it has been called several times. And I hear my wife saying, "Did you get the milk?" "Of course I did."  And as I head toward the cereal aisle, I wonder if Albert Einstein preferred 2% or whole milk? He never did say.

One problem with thinking too much is that my thoughts can go quickly to dark places. It's like those five light years between stars, scientist tell us that it is filled with dark energy and dark matter. Light travels through it, but not in a way that we can see. My thoughts are as bright as I allow them to be.

I've tried to stop thinking so much, but it's as difficult as keeping the basketball from rolling into the woods behind our house. Once it starts rolling the only thing to stop it are the trees at the bottom of the hill. A billion billion calculations per second is a lot of brain power to control. I can't stop my thoughts, but I can direct them. It really is  possible to think that the knock on the door is someone here to forgive me.

Back at home while reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, I remember that I forgot to check the date on the milk. It's a little late now and besides I'll know in a few days.

Writing Stories

"No story is a straight line."  Pat Conroy

I write stories like the pieces of a puzzle.  I write different parts of the story, in what may seem like random order, and I let you put it together.  Most of my readers seem to get it and even to appreciate my style.  Others are put off by it and don't understand why I don't just start at A, then proceed through the letters to Z.  I don't write that way  because the stories aren't created that way.  Also, I can't just regurgitate letters onto the page that tell the story all at once.  I start with a thought. Then I have to place the twenty six letters at the top of the page and pull them down to my palette one at a time. I then form words which form paragraphs which complete my thoughts and tell the story.

To  quote Pat Conroy puts me at an  incredible disadvantage.  Conroy in my opinion is one of the greatest storytellers to have ever lived.  When I finished his novel The Prince of Tides, for example, I laid the book aside and simply basked in the wonder of it all for several minutes before I did anything else. Those characters and that story had become more real to me than anything in my walk around world. I read that book over thirty years ago and those characters are still very real.  When I finished reading the novel I  gave it to my best friend to read.  A few weeks later when he was through reading it, he said, "Helms, there needs to  be an 800 number to call to talk to somebody." So to place my letters and words in the same body as those of Pat Conroy is quite presumptuous.

But I think we all do this to some extent with our own stories.  We compare the daily events of our own lives to other lives, especially  the lives of "the rich and famous" and feel that our stories don't matter as much, or matter at all. I can remember when I much younger feeling this way. I thought for my life to have meaning and for me to leave a legacy I would have to become one of "the rich and famous", or at least become one or the other. The irony is that when I ceased trying to become either one, I became both.  I am rich in more ways than I can describe. I'm listening to incredibly beautiful choral music via my new Sony Bluetooth noise-cancellation headphones. The music includes modern composers and composers from as long ago as the 13th century. Upstairs my wife is playing cards with our ten year old guest. I can't imagine being more happy or content. And I'm famous to the hundred or so people who know me. "Big Dave" is known from Georgia to California.  These people have allowed him to tell them stories and to make them laugh. One of my favorite fans calls me "Bihbave".   Hollywood has never called, but this two and a half year old seems to think I'm pretty special. I think he's pretty special too.

I write stories like the pieces of a puzzle.   The  first paragraph is one  piece.  The next is another. When I'm finished writing there are eight or ten pieces for you to assemble,  for you to make a picture. Feel free to assemble them any way you want to. The story you read is unique to you because my pieces get all jumbled up with yours and  the story you discover is completely unique.

Tomorrow a story begins.  We have been planning this story for over six months. We know the characters and the plot, but we have no idea where the story will take us.  And we don't want to know. We just want to be there when it happens. Each moment of each day will be like the pieces of a puzzle.  And we won't know for years what the picture looks like. Five main characters will be in that picture, but years from now for each of us it will look completely different. We will each have our own picture to treasure. We will each have a different story to tell our grandchildren. Unless, of course, our grandchildren are making the trip.

"The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws." Pat Conroy. Yeah, that's what I was trying to say.

In My Life

"But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll stop and think about them
In my life, I love you more."  In My Life, John Lennon, Paul McCartney. Recorded by Judy Collins, 1975

"I have no thought of time
For who knows where the time goes?"  Who Knows Where the Time Goes, Sandy Denny. Recorded by Judy Collins, 1975

"Together we dived into a pool that wasn't there until we dived." from Presentness, Ross Snyder

This afternoon I bought a set of Sony wireless noise-cancelling headphones at Costco. My Bose headphones have served me well for ten years or so but they're completely worn out.  People around me can hear them as well as I can. I've done some research to replace them. And all that research was for Bose headphones.  Both of our automobiles are equipped with Bose surround-sound systems.  I'm a Bose kind of a guy.  But we were in Costco and I walked by a display of headphones.  All that were available were Beat and Sony.  I didn't bother to listen to Beat and put the Sony headphones on my head. I was immediately impressed with what I heard.  To cut down on buyer's remorse, at home I did some research on them. About fifteen minutes.  And I drove back to Costco, about a half mile drive, and bought them.

At home I read all the instructions to figure out the Bluetooth part.  The instructions stated which phones were compatible with the unit and mine was not listed.  But since it's relatively new, I figured my phone didn't exist when those instructions were printed. After some trial and error, the Bluetooth still didn't work. Who ever came up with "Bluetooth" anyway?  Why not just "Wireless"? Then it occurred to me that I hadn't charged the headphones. I charged them for about twenty minutes and tried again.  I followed the connection instructions for my phone and the unit, and voila it worked!  I'm listening to Judy Collins, wirelessly, via Bluetooth and Spotiify from my phone. So why does that matter? Why is wireless better than using a cable?  I haven't figured that part out yet. But it works. And I will.

Another decision I've got to make is whether or not to download the Sony headphone app I read about after the fact. My hesitation is that since I've got the wireless working, why do I want to risk that to install an app that's supposed to connect my headphones  to my phone? They're connected! My curiosity has the best of me though; I'll download the app when I'm finished writing. If it messes it up, I've already figured it out once today.

These songs I quoted were recorded by Judy Collins in 1975.  In 1975 I was a senior in college. My girlfriend was soon to be my fiance, and within a year she would become my wife. At the time I struggled on any day that ended in "y". But I was going through a particularly difficult time.  My girlfriend wrote out by hand the lyrics to "In My Life" and put it in a nice greeting card.  That act of love and kindness meant a lot  to me then and it means a lot to me as I think about it now. Girl. Girlfriend. Fiance. Spouse. Soul-mate. And then "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is just such a beautiful song.  Listening to it now it sends me back over the decades to the fall of 1975 when in my dorm room I dropped the needle on my LP for the first time to listen to it. It seems impossible that I performed that simple task nearly forty-three years ago. "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" means something different now than it did in 1975 when I was twenty-two years old.

Twice I've clicked on Spotify on my computer to change the song. Twice I've remembered I'm listening to my Spotify app on my phone and not the computer. I'm easily amused.

I kept the receipt, but these headphones are keepers.  Bose is good, but apparently they're not the only game in  town. I really like these headphones. Now I'll download that app. How hard can it be? Give Bluetooth a fighting chance and it will connect to something. Give your girlfriend a fighting chance and she'll change your life. If you're lucky, she'll become your wife.

Nevertheless...

"I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me." Galations 2:20

I'm a Christian. I have friends I admire and respect of other faiths and belief systems, but I'm a Christian. I became a Christian in the "evangelical" way when  I was ten years old.  During a revival at the Hillcrest Baptist Church in Enterprise, Alabama I made a "profession of faith". I gave my heart to Jesus. My church held revivals twice a year. These were two week revivals including the Friday and Saturday nights in between.  If that was not enough, my church provided a Saturday morning service for the "juniors", the children and adolescents. That morning the world-famous evangelist Rev. R.G. Lee laid aside his hell-fire and brimstone rhetoric and used pictures from a children's Sunday School  room to share the gospel. He held up a picture of the serpents and explained that the children in the wilderness only had to look upon the serpents to be spared their wrath. And he explained that accepting Jesus was just as easy.  So  during his "invitation" I asked Jesus to come into my heart. And He did. Riding my bicycle home from Mark Sawyer's house I remember that I didn't feel any different, but I accepted by faith that something important had happened to me.

That happened over 55 years ago. My belief has shifted exponentially over the years, but my faith is stronger than ever.  Because it's not my faith, but "the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me." In this age of man-made driver-less automobiles, surely God almighty can arrange an effortless faith, a faith that takes care of itself.

As a child, through early adulthood, I was taught that if you "accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, if you go to church and read your Bible every day" then you will remain "in the center of God's will". And everything will work out the way it's supposed to.  I have found that not to be true.  A college education,  a good credit score and a 41 year marriage has been useful also.  Good medicine has saved my life as well.  When Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull talked about the "good medicine" that spared their lives over and over again, it was one thing.  My "good medicine " is of the pharmacological variety. It won't stop arrows and bullets, but it prevents any number of serious problems.

"Nevertheless I live."  My life has been spared more than once.  There was the afternoon I got hit by a car as a pedestrian and walked away.  I was sore for a few days, but otherwise unhurt. Then there was the near catastrophic collision on I-75 south nearly seven  years ago.  I still have a stiff neck to show for it, but I'm alive to tell the tale. In both cases, "nevertheless I live." Besides those potential physical disasters there have been a multitude of emotional disasters.  But I kept breathing. I got help. "Nevertheless I live."

"Christ lives in me."  I don't have to try to be a Christian. I am a Christian.  And I don't have to "read my Bible every day."  I've read the Bible through more than once. I know the message of the Bible.  I know the stories. I know the characters. I know how it ends.

When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness there weren't three temptations, there were four.  And the fourth was the most deadly.  He said, "If you are the Son of God then prove it."  "If".  Jesus didn't have to prove He was the Son of God, he only had to be the Son of God. You and I don't have to prove we're Christians, we only have be Christians. We are the "ian" and Christ is the rest.

By the time I was a teenager, I decided that that ten year old was not qualified to "accept Jesus." So I got "saved and baptized" again.  As an adult I considered that when Jesus said "Let the children come to me" He meant just that. What that ten year old did was just fine. For that matter what the ten year old did was more authentic than the seventeen year old's decision.  That boy only had a pounding in his chest and the belief that Jesus would accept him.  That seventeen year old had seven more years of Bible study, church and life experience.

So why this abnormal (for me) and church y post?  Like everything else I've ever written, I just had it on my mind. And I thought it might be for someone other than me.

In a Different Light

"People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness." Henri J.M. Nouwen

"For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."  Jesus

I have read these words of Jesus hundreds of times over the years and have gained much comfort from them. It's so good to know that Jesus is not only sharing that His burden is light, but that my burden can be light as well.  The meaning is something like, "Since My burden is light and I am in you, your burden can be light." Sometimes, though, when I read scripture, I see something for the first time. Recently, when I read the passage from Matthew chapter 11 I was struck with another possibility. Maybe Jesus wasn't talking about "light" as in not very heavy but "light", that stuff that shines in the darkness.  So now when Jesus said, "My burden is light" he was saying what I carry around is no heavier than light.

Physicists have been researching the properties of light for over a hundred years. For many of those years the scientists lined up on both sides of an argument.  Some believed that light was a particle (a photon), and others believed that light was a wave.  Einstein showed in his General Theory of Relativity that light is both a particle and a wave. Light is indeed a particle, a photon, but that the flow of photons creates a wave. Years later physicists captured a snapshot of this dual behavior so that it was no longer just theory or conjecture.

As the discussion continued, physicists and astronomers wanted to know if light weighed anything and again they lined up on the side of yes or no.  Those who said it did weigh something said that light contains energy which according to Einsten's famous equation means it contains mass. Then if it contains mass it has weight.  One scientist put it this way, "If you have a box containing light and another box without light, the one without light will weigh a little less." Over the years as this discussion continued, some bright physicist said,"Well if light weighs something, it doesn't weight much."

Which gets us back to the words of Jesus.  Why even fool around with this meaning when the context of "light" is the weight of things and not the material that lights the universe?  I fool around with it because light is such an important  theme of the Bible and it is such a pervasive part of our world and our universe. Genesis 1:1, the first verse of the Bible, we read that light was the first thing God created. In the birth narrative of Jesus we are told that the shepherds and wise men followed the light of a star to find the infant king in Bethlehem. I also fool around with it because it's so enjoyable to think that Jesus said, "The heaviest thing I carry is light.  Learn to just carry light."

I do this sort of thing with a lot of Bible stories. Jesus' first miracle was to turn the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. I've often wondered since He was not bound by our natural laws if, just for fun, he turned the wine into 1952 California cabernet sauvignon. The  steward did say it was the best wine he had ever tasted, or something like that.

So giving my theory the benefit of the doubt, today when you feel the proverbial weight of the world on your shoulders, imagine that the heaviest thing you are forced to carry is a beam of light. And walk in the knowledge that "a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness."

Waking Up

"You are waking me out of this sleepiness  into awareness that my life, my thoughts, my body, my tasks, my loves, passions, and sorrows are gifts from You, to be discovered and received this day."  Gunilla Norris. from Being Home, her book of common prayers.

I read these words last week and they struck me as true. The words struck me as useful. To be awakened into awareness is an amazing thing. I suffer from selective hearing and seeing.  I tend to hear what I'm listening for and see what I'm looking for.  And hear and see little else. Awareness on the other hand involves noticing what's going on around me and noticing everything. I've been working on this problem and opportunity for several years, but I still have a long way to go. Norris goes on to define this awareness as something as large as life. And life includes my thoughts, my body, my tasks, my loves, my passions and sorrows. Furthermore, she says, each of these things is a gift from God. Yes, my ability to think, to breathe, to function,  and to love are gifts from God,

Growing up I heard a lot about talents and talented people.  If one excelled in music, for example, it's because s/he had a lot of talent. Then it followed if you weren't any good in music, it was because you weren't talented. In my case as a  musician, I learned that the harder I worked, the longer I practiced, the more often I performed, the more talented I became. I think gifts work the same way. We are given these gifts, but they do little good if we don't open them and breathe life into them. These gifts do no good if  we don't use them for our own benefit and the benefit of others.

Norris states that these gifts include our passions and our sorrows.  It's easy to believe that God gives us passions to fuel our life and our loves, but would a loving God give a gift of sorrows? Does God intentionally make us suffer from time to time? Wouldn't only a cruel God do such a thing? Instead of God giving us sorrow, I prefer to think that God gives us the gift of dealing with our sorrows in redemptive ways. I prefer to think that over time the sorrows, that are a natural part of living, increase our capacity for love and for joy.

"You are waking me out of this sleepiness into awareness." Sleep is a very important part of our lives. The experts usually suggest eight hours of sleep as the optimum amount of sleep. Many people, however, require much less and other people require  more. Regardless of how long you sleep and how deeply you sleep, it's more important that after you sleep, you wake up. Excluding the phenomenon of dreaming, only waking people can be aware. And we need to be aware of everything and not just what we're looking for. Drowsy driving is dangerous. Drowsy living is unfortunate.

Finally, Norris says that these gifts are "to be discovered and received this day."  "NBC is working with a group of astrophysicists to create a new day of the week."  Dave Foley. Ha Ha !  But we don't need another day of the week, do we?  We need to wake up to the seven days we are given. Seven days give us plenty of time to be what we need to be and to do what we need to do. You don't create these gifts, you just receive them. Then you open them, take them out of the box and be grateful for the bounty you've been given. Learning to wake into awareness is perhaps the greatest gift of all.