Embattled Christian

On Thursday, we passed through Seattle airport. Crowds at gate after gate, were glued to scattered flat screen monitors watching the Biden-Palin debate. My husband and I were on route to Portland to visit our son and his wife. We’re scoping out the area to see if it would be a good place for us to live someday. Our son and his wife had told us they would be going to the Living Room Theater in Portland to watch the debates and listen to the largely liberal crowd heckle Palin. Astonishing! Fascinated crowds all geared up to watch the VP debate in bars and lounges, churches and airports, theaters and living rooms. Such interest as never before.

My youngest son asked me, “Has politics always been this interesting?” His formerly apolitical mind has been captured by this historic presidential election. My oldest son said facetiously, “I don’t think I can vote for either McCain or Obama. You have to be crazy to want to be president now with terrorism, resurgent Russia, and the biggest financial meltdown ever!” Interesting point.

We arrived in a rainy Portland and made our way through unfamiliar territory to our son’s apartment where we had a joyous reunion and made plans to explore. We always have a great time when we visit our children or they come to see us. They are the best company for plotting, carrying out, or enduring various adventures and we’ve had more than our fair share.

Portland greeted us with its most plentiful resource, RAIN. We’ve decided to accomodate it with the typical Portlander attitude: ignore it and carry on! So far we’ve gotten lost driving around and through Washington Park, eaten lunch at the Greek Festival. On Friday night we viewed a film at the Living Room Theater: a documentary about Phillippe Petit, the high wire artist who (illegally) walked a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The film was impressive not only for its description of the plotting and carrying out of the amazing feat, but for the insight into the relationships that made it possible and how those relationships were broken by the notoriety that followed.

We are all walking our own high wires: balancing on slender threads of love and faith and loyalty slung above a riotous maelstrom of world events. The trick is look forward not down and give credit for our triumphs, not to ourselves, but to our loyal high wire companions and the merciful God who sustains life from moment to moment.

The following is from an article by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal

“Responsibility! Accountability! Discipline! Oversight! Rules!

The canyons of Wall Street are ringing with Democratic politicians and liberal pundits crying out for the renewal of ancient values and a return to basics. The political right wants market failures to be punished with Old Testament ruin.

So we’re all agreed: Standards of behavior matter.

All that remains is to see if this week’s left-right consensus on standards can be extended to any corner of American life beyond “CEO pay” and other sitting ducks.

Once we’re done imposing Spartan discipline on the dining rooms of Wall Street, how about some of the same for the halls and classrooms of the average inner-city high school? A nation in panic at the sight of banks imploding has yawned for years while the public-school system melted down. . .

. . . This week revealed that when real money is on the line, even the left starts screaming for old-fashioned standards. Thus rose a shout for regulatory “oversight” of markets, and they don’t mean some vague, Googlie “don’t be evil.” They want tough, punishing rules.

This won’t wash. You can’t claim, as holier-than-thou politics is now, that sending an army of regulatory storm-troopers into Wall Street will ensure integrity in mere bankers who themselves come from a broader, anything-goes culture. . .

In my ear, I can hear one of the four candidates giving a speech connecting Wall Street to the nation’s Main Streets. Standards, responsibility, accountability, rules? You bet. Bring ‘em all back.

I wonder which one of them would give it.”

Amen!

I’ve been doing some soul searching about where my opinions come from, what facts do I have to support my opinions, why do I gravitate toward certain political positions, personalities, parties, and points of view (nice alliteration, eh?).  I try to get facts but I often have to settle for my gut reaction.  Why?  Because facts come heavily filtered, watered down, digested before being reported; unless one has the time, energy, and means to track them down and get to the source.  Realistically, this is nigh unto impossible when our sources of information are often not objective. Very often.  Working in a law office has clearly demonstrated this to me over and over.  Guilty or not guilty is often not a matter of fact but of wildly different digestion of circumstantial evidence.  Just consider the concatenation of falsehoods being circulated about Sarah Palin which some try to pedal as information but are more closely allied with slander.

Thankfully, on occasion, I find a source that is able to digest facts and come up with a truly useful and enlightening synthesis.  On world events and foreign policy, I’ve turned to the abbreviated Stratfor newsletter.  Today I received part one of the Stratfor analysis geared toward helping people evaluate the presidential candidates based on REALITY.  Reallity cleary reported, analyzed, and non-partisan.

Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Latin America and more.  What’s going on now, what might happen in the future,  where is the REAL danger, and what will the next president face.  Questions the candidates should be able to answer.  Then you can decide whether the best person to face those dangers will Obama or McCain.

Follow this link and read and GET SMART:   http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20080922_new_president_and_global_landscape

I got the full scoop on the moose saga from my neighbor. The part that I couldn’t see as I cowered in my bedroom above the fray.

A bull moose in rut had been making banshee noises around our neighborhood earlier this week.  On Wednesday night he wandered into my backyard which is when I and my neighbors heard him bellowing in distress.

What my neighbor saw in the glare of her security lights shining into my back yard, was the bull moose charging my hammock, backing up and charging again and again.  On the final charge the hammock got tangled in his antlers and he ran off into the woods.

On Thursday morning another neighbor, having heard the crazy story was so intrigued she decided to get into the act and go search for the missing hammock while I was at work. She found it far down in the wooded green belt behind our houses with a big muddy moose print in the middle of it. She very kindly retrieved it and hung it back on its metal frame.  I thought that was truly going the extra mile.

One last gift from the moose.  He charged one of the trees in my front yard.  Moose 2, hammock 0, tree shorter by about three feet.

As I was writing the previous post, I heard a ghostly howl outside my window.  At first the television muffled the noise and I wondered if it was my imagination.   ooooOOOOOOOOoooooohhhhh!  The labored moan came again.  I felt an electric zing of fright flash across my skin.  I’m alone. My husband is out of town and the two children who remain at home are off helping a friend move into her apartment.

Clang, rattle, clang, bang!!  The sound of a chain grating on metal and metal toppling over resounded from my back yard.  Now, I was totally freaked out.  I called my son and asked him to hurry home.  Visions of a bear attacking a moose in my yard began to coalesce in my mind.

My children came home and discovered a moose munching on trees in a yard across the street. More exploration revealed that our hammock frame was knocked over but the hammock had disappeared. After searching further, Michael ran into our neighbor who said that the moose got tangled in the hammock and ran off into the woods with it.  The moose across the street is hammockless.  We’ll have to check out the greenbelt woods by the river in the daylight to see if the hammock survived being gored by moose.

Ah, Alaska, endless source of great adventures and whopping good stories.

The judgment of God. Repentance.  These are not exactly popular concepts in today’s rational, empirical, enlightened America.  But hubris has demanded its due and the high and mighty in their own eyes are reaping the whirlwind of their own greed.   After all,  God’s judgment is just another description of the NATURAL CONSEQUENCES of bad behavior !

Yes, its time for a new fashion trend in the board room,  on Wall Street, and  in the halls of Congress:  sackcloth and ashes.  The stuff of REAL CHANGE:  repent, change direction, GET IN TOUCH WITH THE RIGHTEOUS PRINCIPLES OF PROSPERITY.  “Wickedness never was happiness” and neither is BAD BUSINESS PRACTICE.

The government may bail you out, God may even forgive you after a few centuries in purgatory, but the American taxpayer owes you only what the free market will bear:  contempt.