Friday Tidings

You’re young enough to be my granddaughter, which makes me old enough for you to consider me an old lady.   But I care more about you than hundreds of your Facebook “friends”.    Your countless selfies have plenty of sex appeal, and I noticed the hotter the picture the more likes you get. Even though we’re “friends” I haven’t liked many of your pictures, but not for the reasons you think. Yes, you’re young, beautiful and fifty likes may make you feel good. But I’d rather “like” the person you really are. Has anyone ever thanked you for helping some of the other kids with their schoolwork? That’s generous of you. Or have any of your friends noticed how well you write?   Did anyone else notice how you helped the shy little boy at your bus stop? His mom told me that he hated going to school until the   “girl with nice eyes” made his bus ride fun. You’re much more than your selfies. (Not that I’d tell you this, but psychologists refer to...

Today we have half the number of churches than we had a hundred years ago.   And each year we lose another 4000. That’s an incredible loss, but why are people leaving church? I did some unofficial polling and these reasons topped the list:       Internet Church : brings a wide variety of inspiring messages with just a simple mouse click. Church without the church. No buildings to support or people to bug you. You never have to quit, because you never really belong.   Jesus-Lite Church : Sometimes a feel-good message is appealing. No Bible needed. Just hear the power of positive cheerleading and leave. But feel-good messages eventually get old. People quit coming.   Love Less Church : These churches are rule-based without a whole lot of love. People quit when they feel like they’ll never measure up —often carrying away their hurt feelings, resentment, and some examples of hypocrisy among the churchgoers.   No Need:  P...

Yeonmi Park knows too much for her 22 years. Americans would have a hard time understanding the kind of brutality she endured. Her book, In Order to Live details life in North Korea—eating rats to survive and routinely seeing dead bodies in the streets. She was taught to believe that Brilliant Comrade, Kim Jong Un could read her mind. She dared not think bad thoughts. Americans were hated. In school, Yeonmi learned to refer to Americans as “bastards”.   Those US bastards were the reason she was starving and her family suffered in dire poverty, living in filth, and nearly freezing each winter. Photo: North Korea by United Kingdom Times Yet even with no access to the outside world, bits of truth seeped in. Ironically, her first exposure to Western ideas was a black-market DVD of the movie, Titanic . In her young life, she’d seen countless people die for the regime, but never willingly die for love. She and her mom escaped to China when she was 13...

Dressed haphazardly and sitting on a tall suitcase, she looked homeless, so I avoided her—missing the chance to meet a woman with an inspiring message. That's  a  story for another time….but it reminded me of a lesson I should have learned long ago. Mom liked exposing me to people, places, and activities that would broaden my teenage mind. In her view, I had no right to an opinion that wasn’t backed by a written expert (she was a librarian, after all). This was a woman who built her own log cabin (by first reading a book, of course). At the time, I didn’t share her love of books, so she made sure I visited museums and watched documentaries, but it was her unusual adventures I remember most…. ......like meeting Jake on the bookmobile. As the library bookmobile traveled along the remotest parts of the Olympic Peninsula, the oddest assortment of people emerged from the woods, but Mom seemed to really know them. She asked about their family ...

Time seemed deliberately slow as I watched last Sunday’s blood moon. As I waited, I thought about all of those prophetic warnings the blood moon signified—global unrest, financial disasters, food shortages, even the beginning of the end of the world. Some of those warnings are warranted—there are food shortages, global unrest; even unrest in our communities, financial disasters, and without question, there's evil.  But Monday came, not the end of the world. Christians aren’t the only faith groups that talk about the end-times, but it seems for some Christians it takes on an urgency that others view as whacky. Especially when we read about some living in bunkers waiting for God’s pending judgment on the world. In full disclosure, during Y2K, I purchased food supplies ahead of the computer crash crisis. January 2000 arrived without dire consequences and eventually we ate the extra food. Lesson learned. But frequent world-ending predictions don’t help our ...