It occurred to me today that inventory should be a part of everyone’s process.
Yesterday, I started writing a blog about inventories, and how important it is, often, to be sure of what you have and what you’re missing. Since I still have a little more to say on the matter, let’s begin.
* * *
My brother and I, when we were kids, had collections. He collected coins, I collected stickers. He collected books on World War II, I collected antique camera equipment. When we were collecting different things, everything was cool, because we weren’t likely to confuse his Time/Life book of Photographs from World War II with any of my Care Bear stickers (I don’t want to talk about it, so don’t ask). My Kodak Brownie II was not likely to wind up in among his Kennedy Half Dollars.
Unfortunately, we both collected comic books.
My brother owned the The Silver Surfer #1 comic book from 1982, and he was very proud of it. He kind of had a thing for Silver Surfer, back in the day.
Even though I wasn’t much of a Silver Surfer fan, somewhere along the way, I picked up the 50th issue of The Silver Surfer. I can still picture it in my mind’s eye. It had a silver foil depiction of the Silver Surfer, and it also had Thanos on the cover, somewhere.
My brother periodically stole that comic from me, claiming that it was his.
I would, from time to time, find my Silver Surfer #50 in his collection, and I would take it back, and then he would accuse me of having stolen what was actually mine. And we would argue about which of us actually owned the issue #1 and which of us owned the issue #50.
So, one day, I decided to create an inventory.
I created a spreadsheet (understand, that this was back in the late ’80s, so spreadsheet technology involved loading MS Office from a command prompt in DOS to launch a spreadsheet maker) that listed out all of the comic books that were a part of my collection, so that there wouldn’t be any more confusion about who owned what.
Another part of me wanted an inventory so I could use it to quickly scan through the pricing guides that I would buy, from time to time, to keep track of the value of my collection.
It just occurred to me that my insurance agent has asked us, on multiple occasions, to create an inventory of what exists in our house, in the event that we ever have to replace our belongings (due to theft or fire or some other disaster), but we haven’t done it. It’s too much work on the off-chance that we end up getting robbed, or our house burns down.
But, I can tell you that an inventory can come in handy for things like that.
* * *
I think that it benefits a person significantly to take inventory of their life, every so often, to get a sense of where you’re going and where you’ve been. Some of the most successful people I know are regulars at doing this. In fact, it might be the case that the most successful people in the world are constantly doing this, so that they never have the opportunity to veer too far from their necessary course.
If we know what we want, and we know what it takes to get what we want, why do so few people end up getting what they want? Maybe, they should have stayed on top of their ‘life inventories’.
I can’t imagine that everyone is doing this, if for no other reason than the fact that introspection is often very difficult. When we look inside, to take an inventory of what we might find there, we often don’t like what we see. We might find laziness or apathy or guilt or hate or addiction, and those things are not what we’d want to find, if we are honest with ourselves. However, without doing some inventorying like this, we can’t set out to solve the problems within ourselves if we don’t even know that the problems exist.
I can’t go shopping for peanut butter until I know that we are out of peanut butter, or that there are three unopened jars in the pantry.
The other problem with doing this type of ‘life inventory’ is what you may discover that you have to do, in situations where the inventory is way off. You see, it isn’t that big of a deal for a person to make a minor course correction in the journey of life, if they discover they are off by a mile of two, but if you end up on the entirely opposite side of the globe, there is much work to be done, and many changes to be made, to get you back to where you want to be. If that’s what a life inventory ends up showing you, then maybe you’d be better off not knowing.
They say ignorance is bliss.
* * *
Today, while I was at work, I unboxed about fifty computers, after having made an inventory record of their serial numbers, so I could attach asset tags (little stickers with inventory numbers and bar codes on them) to the laptops, to get them ready for distribution in the fall.
All the while, I was thinking about this post, because I came to a realization.Inventories are a pain to initialize, and they’re a pain to repair, if the maintenance work hasn’t been done along the way. But, a well-built inventory, that has been kept up all along the way, is a breeze to administer. At work, with only a few exceptions, my inventory of technology is pretty decent, and adding new devices to it is fairly simple.
I suspect that it’s the same way with life. Staying on top of things makes it easier to ‘steer the ship’. If you let things slide, and it’s been a while since you took an inventory of what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you plan to do, then you should expect that the results are going to be pretty ‘off course’.
But, don’t let that deter you from doing what needs to be done to get on top of your ‘life inventory’. The alternative, spinning your wheels and wasting your time, passing the days in a manner which might not amount to much when it’s all said and done, could be an epic waste.
It occurred to me today that a proper inventory is an important tool for us all.
I am the technology director for the school district where I work. What this means is that I fix things that have electrical cords. I maintenance things that have electrical cords. I assign things that have electrical cords.
I also count things that have electrical cords. This process is called inventory, and sometimes (shhhh, don’t tell), I use it as a cover.
It is not unusual for me to walk into a teacher’s room in my school district to investigate different problems that may be occurring that I need to address. For example, say Sally Sunshine, a teacher in my district, has installed software on her computer that, unbeknownst to her, is giving away her banking information to foreign web servers. Since I am pretty decent at what I do, I would get multiple reports about activity like this on my network, from various different sources, and I would protect Sally from the foolish thing that she did by installing the coupon add-on for her internet browser. But, to get a sense of how this may have happened in the first place, it might be necessary for me to go to Sally’s room.
When I get to Sally’s room, rather than say to her, in front of her classroom full of students, “Hey, it looks like you’ve done something dumb on your computer, so I’m here to check it out.” I just say something like, “I’m doing some inventory.” Then, I can do what I need to do, and check what I need to check, to make things right again.
Now, none of this is to say that I don’t actually do inventory in the school district, because I do –> a lot of it. But, because I am normally spending so much time on inventory, it becomes an easy thing to say when I am walking into someone’s room and they give me a questioning look. I simply say, “Inventory”, and they turn their attention back to their students and ignore me.
If it weren’t for the inventory work that I do for the school district, we wouldn’t know what we have or what we still need to think about purchasing. An inventory is an important tool for knowing what you have.
And it makes for a great cover.
* * *
Nothing drives me crazier at my house than when something gets purchased for the house and we already have it. Someone buys chicken stock and we already have two containers of it, or someone buys onion soup mix and we already have three boxes of mix. We’ve arrived at the place, on a couple of occasions, where we have had to make a note to stop being a certain thing because we have two dozen of them at the house and it is going to be a very long time before we ever run out of what it is that we have, because we’ve purchased one here or two there, time and time again.
Equally frustrating is when we need something and we run out of it, simply because someone decided that it was okay to use the last of something without adding it to the shopping list. Then, when I go to get some Worcestershire sauce and we don’t have any, not even any unopened bottles in the dry pantry, I get a little peeved.
The issue here is an issue of inventory.
And it’s not like we don’t have tools that we can use to try to make the process of keeping an inventory as simple as possible. We are big fans of Amazon, and we have several Alexa devices all over the house. We’ve been using the Alexa app, in conjunction with those devices, to try to keep a shopping list that everyone can add stuff to and everyone can use when they go to the grocery store. In our house, when something gets low on the inventory list, we walk up to an Alexa device and we say, “Alexa, add avocados to the shopping list”, and she does it.
Or, if we’ve purchased it on Amazon before, we just reorder it.
Two days ago, I changed the furnace filter in the basement. When I did this, I noticed that it was the last one in the box of them that I had, sitting next to the furnace in the basement. I thought I remembered ordering them from Amazon before, so I brought the label from the last one upstairs to the nearest Alexa device and I said, “Alexa, reorder 3M Filtrete Clean Living filters.” They arrived today while I was at work.
But, nothing is fool-proof. When my son adds ill-advised items to the shopping list (“Alexa, add ‘Forza Motorsport 7’ to the shopping list”), or when we go shopping and we neglect to check the shopping list on the app, then the inventory process goes awry.
Additionally, my wife and I belong to two different breeds of shoppers. I am probably your typical male shopper –> with a list of ten items, I will enter a store, retrieve those ten items, and be back in the car in fifteen minutes. My wife does not approach shopping this way. She will enter the store without any need for a shopping list and without any inclination to look at one if one exists. Instead, my wife can shop for ten items (ten items that are on a list that she doesn’t care about or check) and be in the store for an hour. She will come out, sixty minutes later, with twenty items –> six of the ten additional items are things that no one else even knew we were out of and the other four items, of the additional ten, were items that we were going to run out of very soon.
At the end of the day, someone needs to perfect a method for a family to manage an inventory so that, when something gets low in the inventory, it just magically gets refilled.
* * *
I feel like I have more to say on this matter, including the point I was originally hoping to make, before all of this other stuff jumped in the post. So, tomorrow, I will finish it up.
It occurred to me that I’d be much more unhappy, if things were going the other way.
I happen to be of the opinion that America has walked away from its roots and is suffering the slow death that accompanies any decision to abandon what works, in search of other options. I’m specifically referring to the country’s moral downfall, and the fact that we used to hold certain things off-limits; these days, we are more and more often deciding that those things are now allowable.
The problem with this is the sliding scale. With the sliding scale, it is impossible to know what is right or wrong, because the scale is in motion. Any one thing might be morally unacceptable at any particular point in time, but totally okay at a different point in time. It’s relativism, really –> nothing is absolute; rather, truth and correctness are relative to the individual. While no one wants to think about where this course leads, let me say that, at some point down the road, the things that we couldn’t possibly imagine as ‘okay’ are going to be declared ‘acceptable’ by a society that has walked several miles down the road that we first started taking a few steps down.
Imagine the scale –> it has, at its one end, that nothing is acceptable and that you can’t do anything that would be deemed ‘appropriate behavior’ (sounds awful); its other end is that all behavior is acceptable and that nothing is inappropriate (sounds equally awful). The bar is moving toward this latter end, in case you haven’t been paying attention to the society, lately. We are slapping a label of acceptance on all manner of behavior which would have been morally unacceptable not so far in our past.
* * *
I live in a town in Michigan that has decided to jump onto the pot bandwagon, ever since marijuana was legalized in Michigan for recreational use. We now have a number of dispensaries in town, and it’s starting to change some of the dynamics of the town. Depending on who you might ask in my town, those changes might be for the better, or they might be for the worse.
As an example, most of these dispensaries exist on the main street that runs through our downtown area. As a result of the business that is coming in to the downtown area, we are starting to get traffic congestion in this area, where none existed before. The area, which is built for small town traffic, is now having to handle cars from all over the tri-state area, and I suspect that it will only be a matter of time before this traffic starts to become a real problem.
Whether or not you think that the legalization of marijuana for recreational use is a good thing or a bad thing, it is certainly an example of our society and its recent decisions to legitimize previously unacceptable behavior, to be henceforth deemed as permissible. Remember the scale that I was talking about earlier? Whether or not you are in favor of us, as a society, making decisions of this nature, this example is certainly an indication that our sliding scale is moving toward a greater level of leniency than what has existed in the past.
* * *
I know that I have written this post before. Moral decay, America’s declining, blah blah blah. But, this is the point where this post parts ways with what I’ve previously had to say on the subject.
If I’m going to be honest, then I might have to admit that the moral sufferance of our current society frustrates me because I’d love to just let my guard down and abandon my own personal moral code, since it seems that everyone else is doing it. Maybe all of these other people, without any ethical boundaries, are getting to enjoy life in a way that I’m not, shackled by my principles. That’s an issue that I am going to have to deal with, if things continue on their present course.
Furthermore, it occurred to me that I’d be significantly less happy if the sliding scale was headed in the other direction.
Imagine our society getting more intolerant of behavior that might fall outside of a set of acceptable norms. Imagine that we might start to get more strict with our laws, and that we should start to become more dogmatic, when it comes to our licit behaviors.
Take, for example, an issue that was recently raised to me by a friend
–> the respect for human life. While steps like abortion and euthanasia take us down the road to undervaluing human life (unfortunately), imagine what it would be like if we started to try to head in the other direction. Imagine that the video game that I play, where I shoot zombies, becomes illegal. That would suck. Or, imagine saying things like “I’ll kill you” and then getting arrested for threatening a human life. That would suck.
The legalization of gambling on sports has taken our society a little further down the road to total fiscal irresponsibility, but imagine trying to move in the other direction. If I bet my son a quarter that I can do a hundred sit-ups in five minutes, and I win, imagine the police showing up to arrest me for petty gambling. That would suck.
These are just two examples.
My point is this –> a sliding scale of behavioral acceptance slides both ways. And it wouldn’t have to slide very far toward dogmatic intolerance before I would become uncomfortable with my guilt. In fact, the slide toward tolerating more behaviors is probably reactionary, now that I think about it. As society becomes engaged in doing things that are illegal, it then slides the scale so that people can stop feeling so bad about their behavior.
It’s about guilt.
And laziness.
Because getting on top of the set of behaviors that I am comfortable with, when society tells me that they’re not acceptable, would involve work.
I guess I am wishing that we could just leave ‘well enough’ alone.
It occurred to me today that even the simplest things are ultimately complex.
They say that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What this means, when you stop to consider it, is that the journey is actually significantly complex.
* * *
Last week, I tried to run a 5K in the hills between Branson and West Branson, Missouri. It was amazingly similar to, and also completely different from, running at home in Southwestern Michigan. Put one foot in front of the other, do it quickly enough to take about 180 steps per minute, head in a certain direction, turn around when it’s time to head back, etc., etc..
What made it different was the hills.
If you’ve never been to Branson, Missouri, some people swear by the place. I, as far as places go, could have taken it or left it. I enjoyed my time there because I enjoyed being with the people that I was with, but there wasn’t anything about the place, necessarily, that I fell in love with.
Quite to the contrary, I didn’t appreciate the hills.
I didn’t appreciate running (or trying to run) on them. I didn’t appreciate driving on them. I didn’t appreciate hiking on them, which we tried to do once and it didn’t work out so well for certain members of the family in less than peak physical condition.
Just about the only thing that I liked about the hills around Branson was looking at them, and also watching the sun rise up from behind them and set down behind them.
The real problem was this:
Back home, I’d become accustomed to running on fairly flat stretches on land, punctuated by the occasional rise or drop in elevation. Having gotten used to doing that kind of running, I was wholly unprepared for the kind of running that I was to face when a hill –a real hill– loomed before me. Some of the hills that I faced in Branson were steep climbs of a hundred feet within a half-mile, while other hills were sixty foot climbs stretched out over a mile.
Running in my home town is simple running. Running in Branson is too complicated.
* * *
According to Google just now, the journey of a thousand miles is actually comprised of two million steps, based on an average stride length. Therefore, if the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then that first step is merely .00005% of the journey. Another way to look at it would be this: you have to take twenty thousand steps, on the journey of a thousand miles, before you’ve even completed one percent of the journey.
Dallas, Texas; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Augusta, Maine; Jacksonville, Florida; Denver, Colorado; each of these locations is about a thousand miles, give or take, from my home. To walk to these places –a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step– would be ridiculous.
So instead, let’s drive.
It’s going to take multiple tanks of gas, multiple meals at restaurants, and probably also an overnight stay, to be able to finish the drive in the morning. That involves dealing with about a dozen places of business along the way (food, gas, shelter).
Or maybe, it would simplify things if we flew.
Buying airline tickets, shopping for the best price, checking luggage at the airport, the Transportation Security Administration, pre-flight checks on the plane, learning how to find a flotation device in the event of a water landing.
Maybe I’ll just walk.
The average person walks about three miles per hour, and will need to rest and eat, as well as doing other things, in any twenty-four hour period of time. If you worked hard at it, you could walk thirty miles in a day. I’d estimate the journey of a thousand miles, beginning with that first step, will take you five to six weeks.
So complicated.
* * *
I think we fool ourselves into thinking that things are simpler than they are, to make ourselves feel better about the massive complexity of life. If you really stop to think about it, everything that is going on around us is so complex as to boggle the mind. Even the simplest of things are themselves comprised of intricate networks of atoms and molecules, particles so small as to lie beyond the sight of all but the most powerful of scientific tools. These particles are linked together through bonds and cohesions that are strong enough to hold everything together, without us having to worry much about all of that.
Or, maybe we choose to focus on the simplicity of life because it helps us to feel as if we have more control than we actually do. Shall I point out that the global society has recently been ravaged by a virus? If you took a meter and broke it down into a billion smaller pieces, each of those pieces is a length called a nanometer. The coronavirus is only 125 nanometers wide, on average, including its little spikes. That small of a thing has given billions of humans, in all of their glorious egocentricity, many moments of pause.
As complex as life really is, maybe we just aren’t equipped to think about that level of complexity for very long, or very often.
It occurred to me today that there’s something about coming home.
Today was the last day of our summer vacation, and since it’s over, I can now safely talk about it on social media –> since we normally try to avoid broadcasting to the world that our house is unoccupied while it is, in fact, unoccupied. And, even though I can only think of a few people who regularly read my posts, and most of them would have been aware that we were out of town, I told my wife that I would restrain from telling about our adventures while we were still in the midst of them.
This particular vacation was two weeks long, the longest vacation that we’ve ever taken before. We went with another family, also something that we’ve never done before, and we stayed in rented homes, rather than in our camper (which is what we would normally do on a family vacation in the summer). So, needless to say, this vacation was unlike any other we’ve ever had.
And, to further alter the landscape of our family vacation this year, from what it would normally look like, I’d like to introduce –> COVID-19. Our family vacations are normally a combination of relaxing and seeing the sights, but we tried to ‘unpeople’ as much as possible on our trip, which resulted in more relaxing and just hanging out in the houses that we’d rented (three houses in fourteen days). With the pleasant company of family and friends, just hanging out with each other, passing the time in restful, low-stress ways, we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit, with less of an agenda than we might normally have.
Of course, the vacation had its ups and downs. We had some automotive trouble on the way to our first destination, but thanks to our regular mechanic and a trustworthy mechanic that we found near the first house that we rented (thanks to Kevin and the team at Express Lube and Inspection in Baytown, Texas), we ended up getting a solid repair in a decent timeframe for a great price. We also had some problems with swimmer’s ear (a bacterial infection of the outer ear, commonly contracted when water gets in the ear and then doesn’t drain back out) for three of the four kids on the vacation, which involved a antibiotic ear drop prescription called in for us by our pediatrician. But, even when things went wrong on our journey, we found ways to make things work and to get the problems solved.
Additionally, renting houses is an interesting experience that we were largely unfamiliar with before this vacation began. We discovered that you can rent very nice houses for pretty decent prices, but each house rental situation is a little bit different and none of them quite live up to all of your expectations. This one might have a lousy kitchen, while the other one has a great kitchen with lousy bedrooms, even while the third one has a decent kitchen and decent bedrooms in a lousy neighborhood, just as an example.
Of course, we were able to stay in each of these three houses for long enough so that we became familiar with where to find the measuring cups in the kitchen or the extra blankets in the hall closet. But, each of the houses that we rented had certain oddities that seemed to serve to remind each of us that we weren’t in our own homes. Who would put the laundry detergent in a kitchen cabinet?!?! Why is there a switch for turning on an electrical outlet?!?! What kind of a recliner swivels?!?! Why isn’t there a towel rack within fifteen miles of the shower?!?!
When things aren’t set up the way that you would have them set up, it gets on your nerves. And then, after living in a rental house where you finally get things figured out, having to move to another rental house, with more mysteries to solve, is just a little more aggravating. And then, after a few more days, another relocation. After a while, you just want to go home so you can find the coffee filters without having to search for them.
They say that home is where the heart is, but I’m pretty sure that home is the place where you know where to look to find things.
Without fail, I have always neared the end of vacations, thinking to myself, “I think I am ready to head for home.” In situations where I haven’t been enjoying myself, that thought might enter my head days in advance of the end of the vacation. This time, I only really thought that it was time to head home relatively recently. Nevertheless, I woke up this morning in a bed that I don’t own and thought to myself, “Tonight, I will sleep in my own bed.”
It is great to be back in the place where I am always going to be most comfortable. Getting away on a vacation means getting away from home, and that might be necessary sometimes –especially when we sometimes feel like we can’t be in our home without having a list of things that need to get done– but I don’t think I can ever be as comfortable in some other home as I can be in mine.
Don’t get me wrong; it was a great vacation. But, that’s the thing about vacations –> they can’t last forever. My daughters, this evening, were sad when we arrived home because it meant that the vacation was over and my wife and I consoled them to try to help them feel better about the eventuality that they’d apparently not considered until it was right upon them –> vacations end. The return to life as we knew it before our vacation began is now upon us.
I suppose I will be sad to not have a pool within six feet of my back door, or a beautiful mountain range to watch the sun setting on, or a beautiful college neighborhood for my morning jogs, but I will be glad to be back in the place where I know where the paprika is.
It occurred to me today that I have been jealous of the conversion stories of other people.
I’ve often found myself listening to the conversion stories of other Christians and being jealous; thinking to myself, “Wow! What a great story of God’s redemption, grace, and forgiveness!”
The story of the person, at the end of their rope, at rock bottom, when God appears and makes Himself known through the example of Jesus, so the sinner can turn from their sinful ways and begin to walk down a better road, toward a better way of doing things; I’ve always been jealous of stories like that. My conversion story is not like that –> it’s not very inspirational.
I was raised in the church, I was baptized as a teenager, I have been working on my faith and my relationship with God for all of my life. I’ve committed no major crimes or moral indiscretions. I’ve never been at the rock bottom of anything.
Or, take the example of the man responsible for writing a majority chunk of the New Testament; Saul of Tarsus. Imagine walking around, persecuting The Gospel of Christ, when God reaches down and forcefully turns you onto a better road. God chose Saul to become the ultimate example of a conversion story.
How awesome would that be?!?!
* * *
I’ve actually been sitting on this post for a couple of months, not knowing quite what I wanted to say on the matter. I brought it up recently with a close friend of mine, with whom I share a common past when it comes to conversion stories, and he said to me:
“I look at my past and the way that I’ve been able to live my life so far as a blessing. I think my conversion story is the way that God intended them all to be, and that other conversion stories, while they might be great instances of God’s merciful forgiveness, aren’t examples of how things are supposed to go. We are supposed to be raised by faithful parents. We are supposed to make their faith our own at the proper age. It’s like being jealous of an amputation scar.”
When this friend of mine said this to me, I immediately thought of Mark, Chapter 2 (also Matthew, Chapter 9 and Luke, Chapter 5), when Jesus tells the Pharisees that He came to call sinners. When I pair this with information from Romans, Chapter 3 (especially verse 23), I come to the conclusion that I am no better or worse than anyone else, despite my opinions to the contrary. When I think of myself as a ‘boring conversion story’, those who have really wonderful stories to tell would probably be jealous of me, since I didn’t have to go through any of the things that they all went through.
Then, as I was thinking about that, I thought of Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son in Luke, Chapter 15. A lot of retellings of this story stop when the prodigal son returns and the father is glad to have what he’d lost; however, there is the other son’s –the brother’s– story that comes in verses 25-32. I guess I sometimes feel like that guy does.
Except that guy is most certainly meant to represent the self-righteous Pharisees, who were most certainly listening to Jesus when He was telling the ‘lost’ parables that He told in Luke 15.
I guess that the bottom line is this: we are all ‘lost’ before our conversion to Christ. While some might be more ‘lost’ and others might be less ‘lost’, it doesn’t make either position enviable. The best part of being ‘found’ is that you are no longer ‘lost’. What Jesus is saying in this particular chapter of The Gospel is that it is always a great thing when what was ‘lost’ ends up being ‘found’.
* * *
Part of what I envy in these situations is the ‘rags to riches’ story. Who can deny the appeal of movies like Annie or Pretty Woman or Rocky or The Pursuit of Happiness? Don’t you just love to see it when a down-and-out character is able to make their way to the top?
Is there a greater possible ‘top’ than being redeemed by Christ?
The problem with the movies, as I am often reminding my children, is that they often don’t represent reality well. For every ‘Annie’, rescued from an orphanage, there are hundreds of children who grow up in loving homes with loving parents in their lives. That situation, albeit less inspirational, is much more real, statistically speaking. For every ‘Saul of Tarsus’ conversion story, there are probably plenty of stories of the ‘lesser lost’.
And, I’ll bet, God sees all of this differently from His perspective.
A Holy God, who is disgusted by our sin, probably sees very little difference between the ‘greater lost’ and the ‘lesser lost’. Just as I imagine that God doesn’t think that an eighty year old is that much older than an eight year old, having existed for all of time, God probably doesn’t think that much of my pedigree –> I’d imagine that He is less-than-impressed.
What makes the story of Saul and his conversion so impressive isn’t as much about the horrible person that he was, but rather the powerful tool he became in God’s hands. With that in mind, you don’t necessarily need to have a wonderful tale of desperation-turned-salvation in order to be an effective tool in God’s hands.
It occurred to me today that I’ve got a thing for broken-hearted love songs.
My wife and I were driving in the van the other day, and we were listening to my all-time favorite playlist. I have been working on perfecting it, and all of the songs on it, for about a decade, at least. The playlist is known in our house as the Mega Mix. As we were driving around, listening to the Mega Mix, there was a string of about three or four broken-hearted love songs in a row.
At some point during the parade of these songs, I turned to my wife and said, “I do believe I have a thing for broken-hearted love songs.”
After determining, through a short conversation, that a broken-hearted love song is a love song that tells the story of a love gone bad, we started to try to come up with a list of these songs, especially the ones that would definitely be on my favorite-songs-of-all-time list. Of course, as it was happening, this was easy to start, since we’d been listening to a series of them in the Mega Mix.
When I Was Your Man by Bruno Mars Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison I’ll Be There For You by Bon Jovi
And then, after these three played, one of my favorite songs of all time played:
At This Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters
So, from there, we started to try to add songs to the list to fill it out a little bit more. We added these to the list:
When We Were Young by Adele Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley ft. Alison Krauss The Dance by Garth Brooks Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers Slow Dancing in a Burning Room by John Mayer Wanted It To Be by Sister Hazel Purple Rain by Prince I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston Alone by Heart Yesterday by Boyz II Men
And the list could go on and on. Maybe I should create a separate playlist that is just these broken-hearted love songs?!?!
* * *
I don’t know what it is, exactly, that I love most about a broken-hearted love song, but I do know that part of the formula is the emotion of the singer. For me, the beautiful part of a song is the emotion that it contains, that it is able to convey, that it transfers to the listener. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets of all time; he once famously said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
To discuss this concept further, I want to go back to one of my favorite songs of all time, and most definitely my favorite broken-hearted love song –> At This Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters. If you are unfamiliar with the song, check it out HERE.
Billy Vera, as he is singing this song, seems to me to be dying inside. The way that he wails on the high notes, and the agony that you can hear in his tone, speaks of his desperation and gut-wrenching grief. That kind of sadness, that amazingly heavy sorrow, gains a significance that goes beyond the standard “I’m sad because we broke up” love song.
In fact, look at the list above, or think of your own favorite broken-hearted love song –> doesn’t it express a dejection and a misery that you can just feel, that you can just connect to?
The other part of this, for me, is related to the fact that I’m a vocalist. I just really love singing these songs. They tend to be more vocally-challenging, and you have a greater ability to express yourself while singing a song that has such a large range of emotional variation. You can just really beat your breast with songs like these –> I know that I enjoy singing songs more when they seem to have an appreciable emotional size.
* * *
During this discussion that we had in the van the other day, my wife seemed a little concerned about the fact that I seem to like these broken-hearted love songs so much. In my quickest recovery possible, I told her that I like those the most since I am not likely to ever experience such sadness, since we are so committed to being together permanently. She looked at me with an adoring smile on her face and I knew that I had appeased her curiosity on the subject.
But her question continued to ring on in my head, even after I’d answered it.
My wife and I have a bit of a different romantic history; I am my wife’s first boyfriend, but she is not my first girlfriend. When it comes to how we look at romantic sadness, she and I probably have different perspectives, as far as history goes. While we’ve been together for more than twenty-six years, I do have memories of romantic sadness that would cause me to look at these broken-hearted love songs differently than she would.
Additionally, I think that there’s something more that I appreciate about these songs. Romance starts out, for everyone, without fail, to be largely about dreams; as such, these broken-hearted love songs are also –even in their sadness– about dreams. As sad as the songs are, these relationships weren’t always bad or broken. They were once hopeful and excited about the future. The broken-hearted love song is just the unfortunate finale of what was, most likely, not unlike most other love stories.
Finally, I can honestly say that I was being frank with my wife when I told her that it is really nice to be able to appreciate a broken-hearted love song from the perspective that I am never going to have to feel that way ever again.
It occurred to me today that we don’t have any right to expect so much.
I started, yesterday, a post about genies and bottle-rubbing, along with some theological insights, but I wanted to be able to continue some of my thoughts. In case you didn’t read Part 1, it’s HERE.
The gist of the first post was this: if you are wanting someone –in general or in particular– to meet a need that you might have, you are probably more likely to get results in the event that you have an established and healthy relationship with that certain someone –in general or in particular.
But, I’ve got a little more to say than that.
* * *
I’ve noticed, many times when I hear people trying to rub God’s genie-bottle, that they are asking for things that they wouldn’t need, or they wouldn’t even ask for, if their relationship with God was more significant, more healthy.
For example, I’ve heard my fair share of people trying to rub God’s genie-bottle because they need God to get them out of jams that they’ve gotten into, because they aren’t following His rules or His design. I don’t know if that’s how He would do things, but I do know that it’s not how I would do things.
I’m a computer repair guy, among other things, and I know for a fact
–because I’ve done it before– that people who don’t follow the instructions that I have for them in how to use a computer are not at the top of my list of favorite customers. If a computer repair comes across my desk, and the malfunction is a result of someone not doing what I told them to do, not following the instructions properly, that repair goes to the bottom of the list.
While I am sure that God is infinitely greater than I am –infinitely wiser and infinitely kinder and infinitely more forgiving (thanks be to God) and infinitely more compassionate– I often wonder whether or not one’s request for miraculous intervention, in paying the mortgage this month because one has run out of money at the casino, doesn’t end up at the bottom of God’s list.
Or, as another example, I’ve also heard of a number of people rubbing God’s genie-bottle to ask him for things that a person of faith would find of less interest when their relationship with Him is at its strongest. If you think about the things that people are often inclined to ask a genie for, when they stumble across his bottle, they tend to be the kinds of things that people with a strong faith feel like they are already getting from God, when they trust and rely on Him. I truly think that, by and by, people with a more significant relationship with God will come to find that “the things of earth [do] grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace”
* * *
If you’ve ever seen Disney’s Aladdin (the cartoon, not the live action hack job that came out last year or the year before –> don’t even get me started on what a joke it is that Disney is rehashing their old classic movies into live action remakes), I would hope that one of the things that you noticed is that, for the genie, service outside of the context of relationship is just a monotonous bore for him.
But, as Aladdin and the genie develop their friendship during the course of the movie, it becomes easier and easier, it seems, for the genie to do whatever he can to help Aladdin out. Near the end of the movie, when Jafar takes the lamp and becomes the master of the genie, you see the genie’s entire demeanor change. The genie doesn’t appreciate having a new master, after he worked to befriend his former master.
The other part of the story, related to this theme, is the part, earlier in the movie, when Aladdin is forced to make a decision to either honor his promise to release the genie with his final wish, or to use his final wish for himself. Unfortunately, Aladdin betrays his friendship to the genie, intending to use his final wish for his own purposes. Greed: 1 — Honor: 0.
However, before he ever gets the chance to actually commit the betrayal, the plot takes a different course and Aladdin makes it all of the way to the end of the movie before he has to decide whether or not to break his previous promise. The genie, at the end of the movie, actually encourages Aladdin to forget about his promise and to use the final wish for himself. But Aladdin frees the genie and honors their relationship.
Service in the context of relationship can be enjoyable; the reason for this is that we want good things for those that we serve –our friends or our loved ones– because of the relationship. Service without that context can be a drudgery, or worse, a manipulation of a pseudo-relationship to receive service rendered.
* * *
When I think about the Christina Aguilera song that was partially responsible for this extended post that I’ve been putting together, the song is –in a certain way– a love song. When I think of love songs, I think of my wife.
For most adults, living in modern society, the importance of the primary romantic relationship is significant. The relationship that we have with our significant others is one that involves a lot of learning, compassion, and understanding. Forgiveness for our significant others, as they are in a position to hurt us in ways that no one else may be able to, is the penultimate endeavor; the only endeavor more paramount would be their forgiveness of us for the same reasons.
Because our significant others are so central, much of the time, to our happiness, it’s important for us to do our best to serve them –and to serve our relationship with them– so as to avoid giving them reasons to be unhappy. As my post from yesterday illustrated, it’s always better to be on good terms with people if you expect that you are going to be needing or wanting something from them.
Hopefully, however, you and your significant other would eventually get to the point where service and self-sacrifice wouldn’t be a quid pro quo situation where each of the partners are just doing what’s fair, to keep things even –> she made the bed so I’ll do the dishes or he mowed the lawn so I’ll fold the laundry. It should eventually be the case that service becomes what you want to do in order to be a benefit for your partner, whether or not it’s fair.
It’s unhealthy to stay in that place where things stay “only fair”.
* * *
So, genies and bottles and rubbing aside, see what you can do to foster your relationships today by showing people the bonus of your service. You’ll be surprised how far it goes.
It occurred to me today that so many of us are rubbing the side of the bottle.
In 1999, Christina Aguilera burst onto the scene of pop music at the ripe ol’ age of nineteen with the hit, Genie in a Bottle. The song, if memory serves, was a rollicking good time, specifically focused on the mating dance of the All-American Club Goer. While the specifics of the lyrical score have escaped me over the last couple of decades, I do remember the lyrics mentioning how imperative it is, when it comes to the genie, to “rub [me] the right way”.
Oh, how true that is.
* * *
I’ve often noticed, when it comes to the people around me, that many of them treat their faith in God as if it were a genie-in-a-bottle kind of situation. It always occurs to me, when I hear people say things or see them do things that suggest that God is just a cosmic wish-granter, that I don’t think that’s how it works at all. Perhaps, I’m wrong, and I’ve been operating under some false assumptions about whether or not God is just sitting idly by, waiting for us to ask Him for things. Somehow, though, I don’t think I am wrong about this one.
For example, if I pray to God that it doesn’t rain next Tuesday because I have a golf outing with a couple of my closest friends and I don’t want to have to cancel it, I guess that can only go a couple of different ways. Are you with me on this? 1) it doesn’t rain, or 2) it does rain.
If it does rain, I’m left with 1) my reaction to that, and 2) my interpretation of why God chose to allow rain to ruin my golf outing. Similarly, if it doesn’t rain, I am still left with 1) my reaction to that, and 2) my interpretation of why God saw fit to allow my golf outing to happen.
Regarding my reaction to the events that unfold, I would hope that I would find a way to react with a grateful attitude, regardless of whether or not God answers my prayers, because that’s what people with a real faith would hopefully do. Because God is God and we are not, his decisions as to how to answer the prayers that we issue are beyond our ability to understand. We ought to realize our proper place and just take His decisions as they come.
Maybe God brought rain, not to ruin my golf outing, but rather to feed the crops in the field next door to the golf course, so that people might be fed and a farmer might be able to earn a wage. It is the height of arrogance and ego to think that my behests are any more worthy of God’s time than anyone else’s.
As to whether or not God has nothing better to do than to meet my fickle and inconsequential requests, I’ll let you answer that. When you see people who try to rub God’s genie-bottle, expecting him to grant their wishes, and they react poorly to those wishes not being granted, it is a pretty decent indication of the nature of their heart and the absence of their faith.
I’ve heard it said that people tend to interact with God in a manner similar to the way in which they interacted with any father figures they may have had, growing up. When I was a kid, I didn’t bother my dad with requests of no consequence; I simply knew better than to inconvenience him with anything, because he was a hard-working man who was doing his best for his family. Maybe that upbringing put me in a position where I don’t ask God for a rain-free afternoon for a golf outing –> God’s got better things to worry about than my capricious pleas.
* * *
I have friends that I would do anything for, and I would hope that they would feel the same way about me. We feel this way (hopefully) about each other because of the relationships that exist between us –> relationships that are based on sharing and love and fun times together. But, unfortunately, I also have friends that only seem to want to be my friend when I have something that they need.
Even more unfortunately, I have been that guy who only calls on certain people when I need them, but I don’t really foster the relationship with these certain people the rest of the time. I have, on more than one occasion, felt ashamed of the fact that I use people sometimes.
I don’t know if you have anyone in your life that uses you, but it always makes me much less likely to answer someone’s request of me when I know that they are just using me. In the context of a relationship with someone, I’ll usually go all out, but I not nearly as willing to help out when the relationship isn’t there.
The funny irony of this scenario is as follows: when I have a relationship with someone, and I ask them to help me out with something, they normally do whatever they can; but if they can’t, I’m much more likely to be understanding… because of the relationship. When someone tries to use me for something, and we don’t have a relationship, I could say no, but they aren’t going to be very forgiving of that… because there is no relationship.
Now, imagine how God might feel when people, lacking a relationship with Him, come at him only in those circumstances when they discover that they need something. We actually have people like this in the church that I help to lead; you only see them in church, using the prayer chain, showing up to services, trying to get their lives right with God, when they need something from him. Then, all of a sudden and out of the clear blue, they want Him for what they want Him to do for them.
Once that need is met, either by God or through some other means, those people are gone again, at least for as long as it takes for them to end up needing something else that they want to rub God’s genie-bottle for.
* * *
So, as it turns out, Christina Aguilera is really only going to “make your wish come true” if she “like[s] what you do”; I know this because I went and looked up the lyrics after all. But, since I have a lot more to say on this particular subject, I am going to press the pause button on this post, and continue it more tomorrow.
It occurred to me today that pain is something that you can get used to.
I burnt my foot about a week and a half ago, right on the bottom of it, by stepping on something hot that I didn’t know was there, while walking around barefoot. Whatever it was that I stepped on burnt through several layers of the skin on the bottom of my foot. It hurt pretty bad. Then, the burn closed over with new, calloused skin on the bottom of my foot, and that hurt a little less and a little differently. Rather than being a sharp pain that was localized to a specific area, once the burn closed over, it became a dull pain that hurt with every step over a significant part of the ball of my foot.
This created a couple of problems. The first problem that it created was that I started walking on the foot funny, to favor the burnt area on the bottom of it. Walking on the outside edge of the foot caused my weight distribution to be a little bit different than normal. By the time the burn on the bottom of my foot healed (closed over), I’d ended up messing up my plantar fascia. The problem with stressed-out plantar fascia during the summer is that I love to be barefoot and these ligaments –the plantar fascia– require proper support as much as possible, if they are going to heal.
One of the other problems with plantar fasciitis (irritation of the plantar fascia) is that I’m a runner, and it’s very painful. I haven’t been able to run since Monday. I’ve been hobbling around ever since it became painful to walk.
As much as I love to be barefoot in the summer, I have recently had to wear my running shoes, with socks, to get my foot the proper support that it needs to be able to heal. While I’m on the mend, and things have almost gotten back to normal, I’ve noticed a few things about the pain from it.
One of the things that I noticed is that you can get used to pain.
* * *
My daughter got a case of swimmer’s ear this week. If you don’t know what swimmer’s ear is, you get it as a bacterial infection of the ear canal. It can be quite painful, and my daughter has been complaining of the pain for about four days now. A couple of days ago, we finally decided to have our pediatrician call in a prescription for some antibiotic ear drops. As we’ve been putting the ear drops in her ears, they have been taking some time to get rid of the bacterial infection, and of course, her pain continues.
The funny thing about her pain is that she’s gotten used to it.
As she was complaining about the pain earlier in the week, we asked her to describe it on a pain scale, just like they do in the hospital. As she told us about the pain that was significantly bothering her, she described the pain with a number that has been pretty constant throughout the week. The thing that has changed throughout the week, while the pain number has remained pretty constant, is the extent to which my daughter has been bothered by the pain in question.
Earlier in the week, my daughter seemed on the verge of tears when she described the pain in her ear. Yesterday, describing the pain in her ear, she almost seemed bored talking about it.
I’ve been wondering about this change as the days have gone by. I don’t know what leads us to become accustomed to the pain in our lives, but it is most certainly a fact that we do. I also wonder whether or not my daughter has been finding ways to deal with the pain, because of the hope that she has the her medicine will soon work –> the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
* * *
This concept doesn’t just apply to physical pain, either. I unfortunately know this for a fact.
If you’ve ever lost someone very close to you, then you probably know what I’m talking about. Grief can become a very close presence in your life, in deed. That grief can stay, for days and weeks and months, and the pain becomes something that you learn to tolerate. Sometimes, rather than making our way through a process of healing so we can get to the place where the pain is manageable, we instead become fixated on the pain of grief, and we start to own that pain as something that we can hold onto.
This isn’t healthy, of course. Grief is supposed to be a temporary pain. Death takes people away from us, and we will never get those people back, of course, but that grief isn’t supposed to be a permanent pain. No pain is supposed to be permanent.
* * *
Pain is supposed to be an indication of a problem, something that gets out attention, to cause us to take actions to correct these problems. Sometimes the problems can be corrected, but more often than not, the process simply involves a passage of time during which healing can take place.
It is an interesting facet of human emotional processing that we can incorporate pain into our routine daily experience. I guess you would call this coping.
But, I also know that there is an end to everything. Pain doesn’t last forever, and the fact that we can outlast most of the situations in life that cause of us pain can bring us a measure of hope. I like to remember the phrase, “This too shall pass.” to remind me that better days are sure to come.
If you are dealing with pain in your life, do what you can to get it checked out. Also, understand that time will help to get you through it. And hope. Don’t forget the hope.
It Occurred To Me Today 