Headline news

Evidently, two rich men with television shows that people watched and were amused by have had a scuffle; a rich company was also involved in the scuffle. I have spent more time talking about, reading about, and hearing about the showdown between Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, and NBC than I have actually watching either Conan's show, and that I only saw clips of on YouTube. I'm not anti-Conan or anti-Jay, I'm just not watching television at 11:30 PM, period.

In regard to this, my friend, Matt Morrison tweeted,
If more of the 18-34 year olds on #teamconan on Twitter actually watched The Tonight Show, there would be no need for #teamconan. #irony.

Celebrities get more press than a lot of important things, like coverage of wars and politics and the economy and science, I'm used to that. The bit of gossip about O'Brien and Leno is notable, though: the buzz about who gets to have their show at 11:30 has a moral charge.



The story isn't just that things didn't work so well, ratings-wise, with Jay Leno at 10 and Conan O'Brien at 11:30, so NBC rescheduled them and that made them sad; the attitude that I see, on Facebook and Twitter and people's personal blogs is that Conan is a good person and Jay is a bad person and we must ally with Conan to stop Jay because he is bad. (NBC is automatically bad, because it is a corporation.) [Matt wrote a piece on the story that interrogates who failed where.]

An earthquake killed a lot of people in Haiti a couple of weeks ago, and it's caused a lot of trouble for the survivors. Everyone's talking about how we should give to relief agencies, you can txt HAITI to 90999 to give a $10 donation to the Red Cross's efforts there.

It shouldn't have taken an earthquake to make people want to help Haiti. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was so poor that many people were literally eating mud cakes to quell their hunger pangs. Why didn't we care then? [A friend's thoughts on this disingenuousness.]

I went to two protests about the genocide in Darfur. That was so 2006. One protest was in front of the White House, the other, in Central Park in New York City. At the protest in Central Park, there were tens of thousands of protestors. I bought a neat UN Peacekeepers' hat, to wear around, to tell people about how we should get the UN involved in stopping the genocide. Things are just about as bad now as they were when the crisis started, but I don't hear many people talking about it now. My hat is in a Rubbermaid tote in the basement.

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis wrote something about how it's sensible to think that God exists because everyone has a moral sense, a conscience, and this has a divine root. Lots of other people have said this, too. For a lot of people, the idea of morality doesn't have anything to do with God; this worked well enough for the ancient Greeks, I suppose. I think it's common to believe that consciences give us meaningful information about an absolute sense of right and wrong.

Consciences keep people from lying and stealing and shunning, and they seem to tell us consistent-enough things when we're dealing with people in the flesh. I suppose that we could be like ibexes and bang our horns together if we were to have disputes, but we have rules that we all generally follow and so we can spend more time doing productive things, like reading rumors on blogs about the iPad. When it comes to big things, distant things, like gossip and genocides and world hunger and war and slavery, our consciences are like airport metal detectors that would let rifles through but would beep at the zipper in one's pants.

I hope that Lewis isn't too right about our consciences saying something about God or an absolute morality. Does God say that it's more important to help people in your neighborhood than people who are more needy but farther away? Does God say that you should do more to help people when catastrophes happen to them, but that it's less important to help when they're dealing with boring problems like bad drinking water? Does God say that young comedians are better people than older comedians?

I find it liberating to not expect my conscience to say anything about truth, it helps me lower my expectations of myself to the point where I can meet them. I used to think that I was a bad person because I feel more concern for people around me, and less passionate about the genocide in Darfur or world hunger or the wars in the Middle East.

My little sister, Secilee, wrote on the blog belonging to her rabbit, Oreo, about the earthquake in Haiti. She asked the readers of Oreo's blog to donate food and money to Haiti, and to pray for Haiti.

On one hand, my little sister is disingenuous for not paying attention to Haiti until the earthquake hit. On the other, my little sister has no reason to care about Haiti: she knows no Haitians, she doesn't watch any Disney Channel sitcoms set in Haiti, if I were to ask her if she's used any products from Haiti, I don't think she'd could name one. When she heard the news about the earthquake in Haiti, and how much people are suffering, she blogged about it; Mom tells me that Secilee wants to know what more that she can do about helping Haiti. I think that's beautiful.

Singing Unironically

I used to go to a Hip Contemporary Church. The idea behind this church was that if we sang songs in a style that fit with the music that's played on the radio (real radio stations, not religious ones), and if the pastor used Power Point slides and movie clips to give visuals to his sermons, and if we renamed Sunday School to Kidtricity, and if we had a church logo, and we put the logo on frisbees and polo shirts and coffee mugs, then people who would ordinarily never set foot in a church would come and they'd become Christians.

One time, I was driving my family to church in our big blue twelve passenger van. (Dad called it the "Purple Mountains Majesty.") I had to wait, as we entered the church parking lot, because a passel of people were crossing the street. Mom told me that just a couple of years before, none of these people were Christians, and now they're involved in our church; I suppose this idea works pretty well.

One time, at the Hip Contemporary Church, we sang "O God, Our Help in Ages Past." We started singing it in the style of the old hymn that it is; the keyboard was set to sound like an organ. Then, as the second verse began, there was a sudden style change, and the volume went up, the tempo quickened, and the electric guitar got turned on. There was head-banging and applause. At the time, I thought this was cool.

One time, I went on a retreat with my church, the one I go to now, the Hip Mennonite Church. The Hip Contemporary Church is hip as in congruent with our culture; my Hip Mennonite Church is as hip as a church can be and still be Mennonite, which is to say, not very much. We use transparencies, not Power Point, to show our song lyrics. Some of the women wear head coverings and dresses. Each Sunday I expect my thighs to fall asleep, because the pews are old and wooden and uncomfortable.

The speaker on our retreat was E Daniel, the father-in-law of our pastor, Todd, and the father of Todd's co-pastor and wife, Marita. E Daniel used Power Point, but his slides weren't very well designed; they didn't have pretty backgrounds. E Daniel didn't make pop culture references.
E Daniel is bald and old and portly. Before one evening session, E Daniel played Bang! with Richard and Michael and me and I forget who else.

In the evening session, E Daniel talked about how he was always a very religious person. When he got baptized, everyone else getting baptized with him was crying, because they were contrite for their sins. E Daniel didn't have any big sins to make him feel contrite, so, instead, he discretely pinched himself in the back of his thigh until he cried, too.

E Daniel then called Lee to the front of the room.

Lee is old and portly, but he has hair--it's silver. His granddaughter normally sits in his lap during church and pinches his nose and cheeks, and she smiles. I've never seen Lee in a shirt with fewer than two buttons; he is a polite, mature, generous, devout person, and someone we all look up to.

E Daniel told us that he and Lee grew up together. E Daniel asked Lee to tell his story.

Lee used to be a drag racer.

Lee had a fake-o conversion when he was a teenager; he says, he actually just cared about himself, and behaved himself well enough in church to not get into too much trouble. He wasn't truly a Christian. He got married to Ginny, a good Christian woman; she didn't realize that Lee's Christianity was a mask.

Lee hated revival meetings.

He hated how the preacher would yell at people and intimidate them, he hated the weird pressure, he hated how it was the same story every night, but if you were a church person, you were expected to not miss a revival meeting. Most of all he hated altar calls, which always used Just As I Am as the invitation. Lee hated Just As I Am--it's all sappy and the imagery is wimpy. We all laughed, because we hate Just As I Am, also.

Although Lee didn't like revival meetings, he would go to them anyway, every summer, "to keep up the façade." He was more interested in drag racing, so he would fantasize about that while was imprisoned in a pew. He would arrive late and try to sit in the back.

At some of these meetings, he would feel a compulsion to genuinely repent and become a Christian. He didn't want to walk the aisle, though, that would be cliché; he intended to convert at home. However, after he'd leave the revival meeting, the urge would pass.

For no good reason, in one of these revival meetings, Lee realized that he needed to change. Each time he went to a revival and felt compelled to salvation, God was calling him. He had an impression that this might be the last time God called him, after that, God might just let him stew in his stubbornness; God might let him get away with this stunt.

He wanted to do the altar call, but he was ashamed, so when it was time for the altar call, he asked Ginny to go with him, for moral support. The choir sang Just As I Am.


He said that this experience with God was a breath of fresh air. Before, he had been weighed down by living unforgiven, but after he fessed up, he was floating a foot above the ground.

Lee told us that the next morning, at work, he told his buddies that he wasn't going to tell dirty jokes with them any more. He made it clear that he still wanted to be their friend, but something had changed with him, and he felt like he couldn't tell dirty jokes any more. (I suppose Lee was changed in other ways, too, but this was the most concrete change he cited.)

After Lee finished his story, E Daniel asked us if anyone needed prayer, if any of us wanted to live a changed life. We sang Just As I Am.

One woman asked for us to pray for her for freedom from an addiction. Our pastors, Todd and Marita, were the others to come forward for the altar call; they felt overwhelmed and attacked and depressed, so we prayed for our pastors. I don't think I'd ever seen a pastor ask for help like that, before.

Is this your canoe?

All of a sudden, my family decided to go camping in Pennsylvania last October. I drove up Saturday afternoon. On the way, I called Mom's cell phone. Dad picked up. "Dad, I should be at the campsite around five. I'm passing by Giant right now, do you guys need anything?"

"No," Dad said, "Mom's out at the store right now, picking up a new bike lock." My family uses bike locks to secure canoes. "Some friends borrowed our canoe."

Synopsis of Caps for Sale:
The peddler wandered around town, with a stack of caps on his head, calling, "Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!". He could sell no caps, so he hiked away from town a little bit, and sat down by a tree, and took a nap, because he didn't have any lunch. When he woke up, all of his caps were gone! "He looked to the right--no caps. He looked to the left--no caps." Then, he looked up in the tree, and saw monkeys had stolen his caps.

One time, when Mom and Dad were newlyweds living in Alabama, there was a tremendous thunderstorm. Mom and Dad lived in a little house in the middle of the woods. Their home was so small and in such a desolate place that when Uncle Bart visited them that one time, he changed clothes out on the porch for privacy.

So, Dad and Mom were driving home in the storm in their Pinto, the Pinto that Dad later wrecked when he drove it under another guy's car on his birthday. On this backcountry road, they saw a car stopped ahead of them, and, ahead of the car, the road was flooded. The water over the road was indeterminately deep. Now, this car was a bit larger than the Pinto, but, Dad is a nice guy, so he called out to the driver of the other car, "You wait here. We'll go ahead. If this doesn't work, you can go another way"

"And it didn't, and we did, and we didn't, and they did," Mom says.

Water came in through the doors and Mom and Dad had to climb out the windows and push the car the rest of the way out of the flooded road. The carpet got mildew. The Pinto, with its black velour upholstery baked in the summer Alabama sun, smelling terrible for months. Mom still has no idea what Dad was thinking.

At five, when I got to the campsite, Dad told me the story. Mom had driven up to the campsite a day before Dad, and she had brought our canoe. At the park they were staying at, there were two boat ramps, one in the camping area, and one that was more open to the public, and Mom accidentally parked the canoe in the public area. This was bad because when Dad got up to the campsite, late the next day, the public ramp was closed. Mom had locked the canoe to a tree with a bike lock.

So, early the next morning, Dad went to the public boat ramp, to paddle the canoe back to the campground ramp, where it would be closer.

He walked up to the tree where Mom had said she'd tied the canoe, and he saw no canoe. He looked to the right--no canoe. He looked to the left--no canoe. He looked out on the water.

"Is this your canoe?"

There were two guys in our canoe, out on the lake. They had one paddle between them, and the guy in the front was the one with the paddle. (If you don't know about canoes, the one in the back is the one who steers.) "We commandeered your vessel."

What had happened was they had tried launching their boat on the boat ramp, but forgot to have any ropes out, to keep the boat from floating away. The boat floated away. One of the guys ran up and down the shore, looking for a fisherman or something, but to no avail. The other broke the bike lock and "commandeered" the canoe. They were out in the lake paddling after their lost boat.

Dad got them to come back to the boat ramp. He got into the canoe, and paddled the guys out to their boat, and taught them about tying up boats and steering canoes. They gave Dad $10 to reimburse him for the broken bike lock.