Oh, I love this. It's Sunday morning, and once upon a time, on the rare days we didn't go to church, we would instead listen to my dad read a chapter from one of the numerous 'devotional' books my mother had bought, which always contained scripture references so he would go back and forth from the devotional to the bible. Every devotional was written by different people, and each chapter was generally a story about 'life' and an interpretation they felt went with certain bible passages. When I was young it would bore me to death, as I got older I would think about what was being said and there was a time where it all sounded reasonable. Until I went out from the very sheltered world my parents had built around me and found that life was not like those devotionals at all, and whoever was writing them must live in a church, creating a fictional world based on a similar sheltered experience as I'd had. It was Father Knows Best meets televangelism with a dash of a Folgers Coffee commercial- decaffeinated coffee that is.
But this post is a true devotional. A connection to the real spirit in mankind, uplifting, encouraging and practical. And more spiritual than anything I ever felt from the 'daily bread' or the like. Because those were always about being powerless to do anything, about accepting that only the Big Man in the sky had the power to affect change and without him we were destined to fail.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Don't lament that the world isn't what you want it to be or plead with some Graybeard to make it the way you want it to be. Be the way you want it to be and yes, it will be better for it.
Thanks Paul for a great good morning :)
Oh that sounds pretty dreadful, you were homechurched! I got enough sunday school in my youth to know that boredom. I think it's because the preacher man often doesn't really comprehend the text that he's spewing as gospel, and the kids don't necessarily get it either, but they know when enthusiasm is being faked.
Back around 2008 I hung around on a forum that had a pretty liberal membership, and when Obama came along saying "Be the change..." I thought, for just a second, 'hey, this guy's been reading my stuff!' As it turned out, I'm not sure we were talking about the same thing after all, but I never stopped being the change that I'd intended well before then.
I can do simple math, and when I figured out that I could change everything by adding 1 good thing, it was an equation that made sense to me. Then I got this big idea to use the complex mandelbrot set equation to describe my 'add one good thing to make everything better.' That's why I included the video, worth a thousand words, and too complicated to write about for me, but it illustrates things so well, I often return to the fractal zoom as a reference.
The fractal zoom reminds me of a video I saw once that zoomed into the human body into the smallest atom and how it looked quite a lot like space, then zoomed back out into space.
The only thing I can say about church is I met two of my closest friends there, sisters whom Jenna and Jess from my book are based on. Their family made mine look positively liberal-- let's just say that the things I wrote about Jenna and Jess's family in the book were not far off from reality minus having a cool aunt like Harriet. But if they did have an aunt like Harriet their family would definitely have treated her the way they did in the book. I think what separates my own parents and some of my extended family who subscribe to the Christian faith is that their love for people is genuine and they're much less judgmental because of it.
That equation makes sense to me as well.