Mudshot Eyes

The Florida Gators are going to the BCS National Championship Game on January 8, 2007! A victory would complete a perfect story for them, even with the one loss to Auburn. The Gators are celebrating 100 years of football at UF, and it’s been 10 years since they last won the National Title. It’s a perfect time for them to win it all. ESPN story here.

Here’s to my precious wife on her 28th birthday…
You are an amazing woman. Thank you for exuding patience, kindness, love, and grace on a daily basis. I’m honored to spend my days with you.

“This is the true measure of love: When we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Here’s what’s been playing through my iPod lately…

The Killers - Sam’s Town
Brilliant rock album. My favorite release of 2006.

Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope
Fresh sounding vocals, accompanied by creatively applied instrumentation, especially piano. I’m still trying to figure out what is going on lyrically.

U2 - War
I’ve been rediscovering this album lately. U2 stays on top of my list of the greatest rock bands in the world.

Jars of Clay - Good Monsters
I’ve followed Jars of Clay music since their first album. I’ll have to call this one my favorite. Whether you’ve heard any Jars of Clay music before, check this one out.

Tonight, my dinner conversation with Krista centered around the transformation that God is so patiently performing in each of our lives. I have been reminded a lot lately of the vacuum in my heart in the places where mercy, trust, and humility should be.

I shared an incident from the day before when someone turned in front of me after looking directly at me from their spot at the stop sign. I was angry enough to tell PT Cruiser how I felt as I passed. I won’t go into detail regarding the “one point” sermon I gave him, but suffice it to say that he got the message.

Krista shared her own stories, and they were enough to remind me that I am part of a larger human struggle to resemble more closely the One in whose image we were made. That struggle is always connected to our pride or unbelief, as Krista is learning in a Bible study she’s involved with.

Pride gives me the power to place myself as judge over PT Cruiser and his pals. I can also play jury and executioner if I so desire. Unfortunately, as I climb onto the judicial bench to proclaim guilt, I have forgotten that when my name appears on God’s daily docket, I am treated with great mercy. The foolishness of my harshness toward the mistakes of others is now painfully obvious.

Krista and I have wine with dinner a couple of times a week, and we always toast to something. Sometimes it’s to a memory, a friend, or a special place. Tonight we toasted to the need for more mercy.

As the wine hit my palette, our dinner table became a communion table. I was being cleansed, again.

I took a stand today. I finally stood up to the grocery store line bullies who prowl the city, intimidating those of us who simply ask for a little space when we are finishing our transaction.

I was in line at Wild Oats paying for my groceries when I sensed that the person in line after me was getting a little too close. He was a little taller and bigger than me, but not in the athletic sense. He was also older than me, with the look of a burned-out desk job junkie. I’ve had this happen many times in line to pay a cashier, but this guy was climbing into my pocket. That unspoken personal space zone had been crossed without hesitation.

At first, I couldn’t tell if he was just dense and had no social skills, or if he was trying to hurry me along by standing right next to me as I swiped my debit card. Something about his posture told me that he knew what he was doing. He had coupons in his right hand and with that hand he leaned slightly toward me while still facing the cashier. It was a non-verbal message: “I’m in a hurry and you are not moving fast enough.”

I suppose that this is a frequent habit for this guy. And most people probably just rush off, flustered by his lack of courtesy, like I would normally do. But something clicked in me and I decided to do the unthinkable. I turned, looked directly at him, and spoke.

“You are in my space bubble, bro.”

I called him “bro.” Suddenly, the beast no longer seemed like such a bully. The look on his face was priceless as he reached deep down into his cognitive mush for the only sound he could think to make: “Huh?”

This time I enunciated just to be sure he got it. “You are in - my - space - bubble, bro.”

At that moment the cashier handed me the receipt, holding back his laughter as best he could. He knew he had witnessed history. Someone had stood up to the grocery store line bully! Without waiting for a response, I grabbed my bag of organically grown broccoli and antibiotic-free chicken, and walked out the door. I had just re-written the rules of engagement for the everyman.

From Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Pastoral:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be…. You come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals . . . and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception … so ill-equipped are we all to envision another’s interior workings and invisible aims.

That captures for me what I find so difficult about managing relationships. I don’t have a clue what is going on inside the people around me. Even on my best days, I cannot see the real motives and hurts behind what people say or do. I’ve made good guesses on rare occasions, but most of my efforts to speculate the inner workings of another human being have failed.

The early church struggled with this, too. When the question came up of whether or not the new Gentile believers had to be circumcised to prove their heart, Paul put the burden on God to know their motives: “God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:8-9).

My only recourse is in following the example and word of Christ. The greatest commandment in Scripture wasn’t to “figure people out.” Jesus stated it directly from the Levitical law: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I think we spend our lives learning to live that out, but I am beginning to see that it doesn’t include making assumptions about the someone’s motives or categorizing them with strict labels.