If you met a homeless person

Second set of open questions:
What would you do if you met a homeless person?
What would you say to him?
How long would you hang out?
What would you expect to give or get from the meeting?

And finally, are any of your answers similar to the Jesus question?

If you met Jesus

Open question to reply or think about:
What would you do if you met Jesus?
What would you say to him?
How long would you hang out?
What would you expect to give or get from the meeting?

Webster shooting

It hasn’t been all that long since the elementary school shooting in Connecticut. But just this morning another shooting has occurred basically in my husband’s hometown. One of our friends is in the hospital.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/12/24/firefighters-shot-rochester.html

Please pray if you think it will help. And please push for better gun control laws if you know how. Good intents and good action are both needed. I think Jesus would approve of fewer guns, no guns, no knives, no swords. The guy was pretty nonviolent as a rule. It’s been making me crazy that Christians agitate for guns as if they forgot Jesus entirely. He told Peter to put away his sword the night they were coming to kill him. That’s like the epitome of nonviolent. People kill people but guns sure are doing a great job helping them. I wish I had some great plan or catchy rallying cry to fix this. I don’t. I’m incredibly sad for our extended friend-circle and those touched by this. The only thing more I can think to write is this: How many more times do hearts have to break like this?

Prayer and intent can be excuses for laziness

I’m starting to sense a pattern with certain people and groups in terms of how they view prayer and the intent for good. As you may have figured out by the title, I think they can be a great option for making people feel ok about laziness. Prayer is nice if it makes you feel more positive about things you cannot change, or gives you peace amid turmoil. But there are many things in life that we can work towards changing. If poverty bothers you, don’t just pray about it, go donate clothes for people to wear to job interviews. If hunger bothers you, volunteer at a food pantry. Sometimes prayer really is the only thing left to do. But the rest of the time, get out and go help someone. I really only have a problem with prayer when it is used as an excuse to sit on your hands. I think God gave us free will so we could use it to decide to help each other, not so we could sit back and expect him to make things happen.

Intent as a problem is harder to pin down and as far as I’m concerned easier to excuse. Intending good is wonderful. It’s the start of anything good you might ever do. But it’s only halfway there. You have to carry out good actions as well. And you have to be willing to really look and listen to where your actions led to make sure it was somewhere good. And the really tricky part comes next. If you see that your good intentions inadvertently caused a bad result, you have to change.

A story to illustrate:
Mice get in my house and I have to get them out. The standard kill trap rarely works right because our mice are too small to trigger it. The only traps that work are glue cards which mice can’t really get off once stuck. I used to trap mice on the cards then kill them by freezing, figuring for them it would be like falling asleep. I later learned that freezing is probably incredibly painful- the exact opposite of what I wanted. While I did feel extremely guilty, I then found out what I could about traps and learned that mice can actually be freed from glue traps by dissolving the glue in oil. My intent was to spare mice from suffering but instead I was probably causing it. I could have responded in any number of easy ways that ignored what I’d done and continued causing harm. But I wanted to fix it, at least for the future. So I did.

Intent for good is not an excuse for you to do whatever and be ok with whatever results. I probably should have done more research on mice and glue traps and stuff before any of what I did. Then I could have started with good intent and used it to good outcome. As it is I got a bad outcome and have since moved to a better outcome. We need to recognize the difference between intent and outcome because its a way to improve. Good intent is good. Good action is better.

Good examples vs. bad examples

So I was wondering recently if people decide how to behave based more on good examples they see or bad examples they see. Imagining for a second that people are either good or bad (which I don’t believe)- are good people that way because they’ve seen and admired goodness, or because they’ve seen and been repulsed by evil? Do we only know what good is because evil exists? I suppose this is the premise of the garden of Eden story. Adam and Eve didn’t know good or evil. Once they found out good was a thing and evil was a thing, they could compare one with the other and see good is much nicer than evil. If we somehow created a paradise here on earth could we keep it? Or, lacking evil to remind us how things could be, would we screw it all up? What are we dismissing as unimportant today because we don’t see it? I’ve never seen war or even a single person dying. If I saw these things often or even once, would I leave my job and spend my whole day trying to stop war and death? I know for a fact that my attempts to be accepting of those deemed different or weird by society are directly related to my own negative experiences as a child feeling ‘weird’. Maybe the best way to learn is by a bad example.

Good vs. Evil

I wanted to talk about good and evil. In trying to start I realized there are several problems which I am going to mention, then gloss over.

First: I think English is flawed. Good is a broad term but evil is not. Evil means intentional and enthusiastic badness and anti-Godness. Evil is extremely awful. Good can range from extreme to moderate and is usually secular. I use good to describe socks that fit, web pages I like; I’d never call ill fitted socks evil. A true antonym for evil should mean extreme loving kindness or helpfulness and how God would like us to act. I am just going to use the word ‘good’ and hope you can figure out whether it means just ok or the opposite of evil.

Second: I think maybe theologically I’m coming at this from a quasi-Catholic standpoint which may or may not line up with beliefs in other types of Christianity. Catholics have the whole confession to forgive/erase sin. So one of the things I sort of believed growing up was that people were in flux between good and evil based on sins making you evil and confessions making you good. This leads me to what I was actually wanting write about.

I don’t think that way anymore. I don’t believe a person is good or evil, or flipping between the two. That’s way too simplistic. People aren’t either sugary or lemon rinds. Everyone is ziti. Ziti can taste better or worse but it never tastes like sugar or lemon rinds. If you say my ziti is sweet like sugar it can only mean you are using a metaphor. Same with calling someone good or evil. It’s a decent metaphor as long as you remember it is just a metaphor. I don’t think people should actually be lumped into ‘good’ or ‘evil’ because the categories are problematic.

For one thing, no one is static. Lives change, choices are made, people change. A person who you’d class as good can do a bad thing. And vice versa. Calling someone good or evil locks up your opinion of them forever. It lets you not think about the actions they take. It gives you a pass to be mentally lazy.

Another problem with having boxes labeled “good” and “evil” is that it encourages a sort of mathematical look a person’s nature/personality. How many good things does it take for a person to be called good? How many new good things must you do to be “good” if you’ve been “evil” most of your life? Is this really how God is seeing us and how we should see each other?

I think we retweak our ziti recipes every day by our thoughts and the actions that reflect those thoughts to the world. Any day’s ziti could be awesome or awful reminding someone either of sweet, delicious sugar or ucky yucky lemon rinds. And yeah if you fix terrible ziti enough days in a row I might be inclined to call you evil. But rarely would I actually go ahead and do it. And I still would consider it something of a metaphor. No person is fully evil or fully good. Even if you literally buried your ziti in sugar or lemon rinds it would still be ziti under there.

Be Nicer to Atheists et cetra

I’ve been thinking for a while that Christians need to be waaaay nicer to the ‘out’ groups. What I mean is, stop being hurtful, pushy, mean, and condescending to anyone you believe is living a sinful life. It isn’t our place to judge people, God is going to figure all that out in the end. If someone is sinful and unbelieving enough to be sent to hell, I say that’s the best argument of all for being nice to them. What on earth would possess you to be mean or hurtful to someone you think is going to burn for eternity? If you really think that’s where they are bound for, this life is the best it’s ever going to be for them. Go and buy them cake and ice cream! Do it now! Throw them a party! Buy them gifts! But don’t ever be mean to them. If you are right about them, they are going to get nothing but mean in the afterlife. And if you are wrong about them, and they are going to make it into heaven- you’re going to see them later so don’t you think you’d better be nice to them? In fact, just be nice to everyone. Yeah, that’s right. And you know what? Since now it doesn’t matter whether they are going to hell or not, you can also stop judging them. There, I fixed it!

Be Nicer to Atheists et cetra

I’ve been thinking for a while that Christians need to be waaaay nicer to the ‘out’ groups. What I mean is, stop being hurtful, pushy, mean, and condescending to anyone you believe is living a sinful life. It isn’t our place to judge people, God is going to figure all that out in the end. If someone is sinful and unbelieving enough to be sent to hell, I say that’s the best argument of all for being nice to them. What on earth would possess you to be mean or hurtful to someone you think is going to burn for eternity? If you really think that’s where they are bound for, this life is the best it’s ever going to be for them. Go and buy them cake and ice cream! Do it now! Throw them a party! Buy them gifts! But don’t ever be mean to them. If you are right about them, they are going to get nothing but mean in the afterlife. And if you are wrong about them, and they are going to make it into heaven- you’re going to see them later so don’t you think you’d better be nice to them? In fact, just be nice to everyone. Yeah, that’s right. And you know what? Since now it doesn’t matter whether they are going to hell or not, you can also stop judging them. There, I fixed it!