Don't Be A Jonah!

Have you ever been given bad advice? Worse yet, have you not realized that the advice which you were given was bad until after you had acted upon it? Well let me tell you about the worst advice that I was ever given, albeit indirectly, and from a preacher, to boot!

Back around the turn of the century (there’s a phrase which has caught me by surprise a good number of times in the last few years), I was a band director at a rather small school. My son was just a toddler, and my wife and I attended church regularly with the local Baptist congregation. We had an interim pastor for several months, and I thought he was a very good preacher and a great guy all around. Fast forward to a sermon he gave from the book of Jonah.

Independence From Sin

I was a teenager for most of the 1980s. It was a time that spawned a great number of pop culture icons, including a digitized talking head named Max Headroom, Michael Jackson’s phenomenal album Thriller, and of course, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign against drugs. Max Headroom, for all his ubiquitous appearances on TV, became little more than a footnote in pop culture history, while Thriller went on to become the top-selling album in history. And the “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign?

It was ambitious, if nothing else. Every type of media displayed those three little words, completely saturating the landscape with the idea that resisting drug use was as simple as can be. Just say no! Unfortunately, in spite of the campaign’s immense presence and the nearly Pavlovian response drilled into my generation’s psyche, research has indicated that “Just Say No” had little to no impact when it came to actually reducing drug use.

How is it that such a well-funded program, one which was supported by the vast majority of Americans, one with the best of intentions, could prove to be so completely ineffective?

Testing the Waters

Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay

A week ago, I posted my first blog article in… well, a long time. I’ve been going through my old files and I’ve found a few articles that I had completely forgotten writing. Some of them are published in this blog, but a few are not. What follows is adapted from an article which I wrote in March of 2016.

At that time, I was paying for a website with a blogging tool included. Somewhere along the way, I realized it was not financially feasible to continue paying for a website that generated no revenue, so I moved most of what I had previously written over to Google’s Blogger platform, which I still use to this day. A few of those older articles didn’t make the cut, for various reasons.

Today, I was browsing through the old stuff and this particular article caught my eye. It struck me as being very pertinent to my reboot of the blog, and more importantly, to the last several years that I’ve experienced. The term “mid-life crisis” might not be inappropriate. Sure, in some ways my life has been pretty rock solid. I became a grandfather, I have a stable job, my wife and I are in a fairly stable (certainly not luxurious!) financial situation, and from many observable metrics, one might say that I’ve been doing pretty ok.

But is this all there is? What purpose am I serving? Why am I always anxious? Why do I feel so tired all the time? What am I even doing with my life? I want to do… something. But what?

Miracles: A Guide For Gamers

The Bible records numerous events that may only be described as “miraculous.” Moses alone encounters a burning bush, 10 plagues upon the land of Egypt, the pillar of fire and smoke, and perhaps most famously, the parting of the Red Sea. And of course there are others. Miraculous healings, water being turned into wine, and not least of all, people rising from the dead.

Some people find it hard to accept miracles as historical events. They explain them away in any number of ways: symbolism to be interpreted as a moral lesson, exaggerated tales told for dramatic effect, pure mythology, or simple lies.

I must confess, one of the things which held me back from Christianity for so long was my inability to understand miracles. I still hold that the importance of many miraculous events rests not upon historical accuracy, but in the lessons being taught. That being said, there is one miracle in particular which cannot be understood as anything other than an actual historical event: the resurrection of Jesus (refer to 1 Corinthians 15:13-17). Once I understood the implications of rejecting the resurrection as reality, I began to wonder if other miracles could also be more than just stories or symbolism.