from my mother-in-law:
Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.

via grace...

Don't miss this list by Larry Chouinard at Spiritual Conversations. Larry doesn't post very often, but everything he posts is worth reading.

My favorite, #12:

12. You've wanted to close a 'service' by shouting from your pew, "NOW WHAT?"

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

How many 5 year-olds could you fight off, before you were knocked out?
the shocking truth here.

factors include:
Have they been talking back to me all day? (this would result in a serious increase in my count)
Can we use some of the smaller ones as weapons?
Do I get a guitar - acoustic or otherwise. Or a puppet. Can I have a puppet? How about Chee-tos? Am I issued weapons of any kind?
If said kids have been raised on the average American youngster's diet of McNuggets and large quantities of Red #40 I could take 10 max. There's no stopping that kind of mutant resiliency.
But If they are musicians' kids, eating organic and taking guitar lessons instead of playing little league? Several dozen. 48ish.

my friend, luke mckay, has seriously made it in the cartoon industry. as co-creator of red vs. blue, he commands a huge cult following. of course his greatest claim to fame is designing the logo for our new restaurant, the bad dog grill.

"A benchmark of emotional management and responsibility is the realization that our past can no longer be blamed for our actions in the present."
Doc Childe and Howard Martin

every day i work with people who are victims, real or imagined. they grew up in a bad home, someone has rejected them, the white man has dragged them down, people have taken advantage of them, the list is endless. there is no shortage of people to blame.

sometimes a client or person i am talking to has legitimate issues. they are dealing with things that most people can barely imagine. they are trying, the best they know how, to find some anchor in a life that is beyond their control.

but others are looking for something to pin their pain on. they cannot see any personal responsibility, they will not own their own complicity. they sit and we talk and it is always someone else's fault. often they have legitimate complaints but they wear their victimization like a crown and filter everything through with a pre-disposed diagnosis. this week i met with a young man who told me that the reason he could not pass in school was because a few hundred years ago people oppressed him. i reminded him that he was not in fact alive a couple hundred years ago and though he has had to suffer historic abuse and that has undoubtedly affected his life, perhaps the reasons he is failing in school have more to do with the fact that he is skipping and spending his considerable income on crack. he called me a bigot.

i come from generations of alcoholics and the pragmatically poor. my dad was an orphan whose father fell from a skyscraper during his last week of work before going to a new job. his mother died when he was 12. he completed grade 9 in school. he had no social safety net, no social worker looking out for him, no strong family to provide for him, no one to blame. so he didn't.

years later my father would stand before the governor general of canada and receive the military equivalent of the order of canada, our highest civilian honor. he had, in fact, finally finished his high school equivalency in his forties. he had worked his butt off to make something of a shunted life. he is my son's hero.

every now and again i will have occasion to feel sorry for myself. maybe things aren't going smoothly or my friends have nicer houses or boats. sometimes i wish i had a family with money and a house on a lake. but then i remember how fortunate i am to come from a heritage that simply would not give up.

as i sit here writing this it just hit me, i have never heard my dad complain about his lot in life. ever.
wow.

“People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.”
J. Michael Straczynski

bad to the bone...

‘Most theologians devote their lives to answering questions most people aren't asking'
C. S. Lewis

Hirsch estimates that 85% of the population who will not be reached by the contemporary church growth model. Yet this is the model that is being offered by many as the solution for the North American church.

Hirsch argues that our current model of church will not produce different results. "More of the same, only better, will not solve the problems of the church," he said. "If you want to dig a hole over there, it's no use digging this hole deeper."

the rest from dash here.

my friend monica has her facebook profile as "not a christian. i'm a jesus follower, there's a difference!"
though not a new idea, it seems to be gathering more and more steam. here's the question, has the term christian lost it's contextual relevancy? outlived its own meaning? been so co-opted that it has become a negative connotation?