*Ahem* Hot Spots

Those crazy guys over at the Woods-n-Water News ("Michigan's Premier Outdoor Publication") are at it again! I've written before about the teaser headlines they put on the cover that just make you want to buy it so bad (see my post on 12/13/06, Corn-Crazed Ducks).

Well, the cover of the May issue is no exception. Consider this one: "Crappie Hot Spots." Immediately I'm thinking about the Hollywood walk of fame, where in places the stench of urine is sufficiently strong to distract one's attention from the hookers who are accosting passers-by. Now that's a crappie hot spot!

Actually, I already knew that crappie was a kind of fish, a fact learned by embarrassing myself in front of hundreds of people. When I was in high school in Nashville, Arkansas, I worked part-time as an announcer for radio station KBHC (pronounced Kye Bay Ayech Say), "The 500-watt Voice of Southwest Arkansas." One afternoon, I read the local fishing report over the air. There were all kinds of reports of crappie catches from across the region. When I finished, the phone began to ring.

"It's pronounced croppie, you dunderhead!" the callers nicely explained. Right then and there, I was in a crappie hot spot. It's the only crappie hot spot I've ever been in or ever care to be in. So, I passed on purchasing the May issue of the Woods-n-Water News.

Random Thoughts on a Friday Morning

• Recently remembered proverb: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time...and it annoys the pig."
  

• I'm fond of saying, "A successful day is one where I cross four or five items off my 'to do' list and only add seven or eight more." It occurs to me that that statement says a lot about deficiencies in my spiritual life.

• Why is it that so many things on my "to do" list are things I don't want to do? I sometimes get real whiny about that until I remember that the cross was on Jesus' "to do" list.

• Recent favorite song to listen to: She Walked Away by BarlowGirl.

• I just finished a deep and meaningful conversation with a five-year-old girl. She had lost a tooth the night before Easter. The next morning, she had an Easter basket and money under her pillow. She and I are beginning to suspect that the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny are the same person.

• I used to have a recurring nightmare where I'm in church and we're singing the song before the sermon and I realize I'm only wearing my underwear. It used to happen once every couple of months or so. But I haven't had that one in a couple of years. I wonder what that means.

• I have a Far Side daily calendar on my desk. I especially look forward to the cartoons about hell. Like one that shows a demon ushering a short, portly, tuxedo-clad man into a room full of banjo players. "This is your room, Maestro," quips the demon.

Mourning for Ministry Marriages

A Tennessee jury today found Mary Winkler guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of her husband Matthew. Matthew was the minister of the church of Christ in Selmer, Tennessee. The jury of ten women and two men rejected the charges of first degree and second degree murder. In Tennessee, voluntary manslaughter suggests that the crime was committed in an irrational state. Mary claimed that Matthew had been verbally, physically, and sexually abusive.

Thirty years ago, I had a coworker who was good friends with, and had great admiration for, Matthew's grandfather. That's my closest connection to this family. I don't have a right to an opinion on the matter. But I do believe the jury did their very best to render the verdict that best fit the circumstances.

However, the Winkler case serves as a warning to all of us in ministry. Of course, their situation was extreme. But how many ministry marriages are in crisis due to neglect, workaholism, pornography, disrespect, domineering attitudes, or outright abuse? And how many minister's wives keep silent because asking for help would jeopardize her husband's career (and thus her security)? How many ministry families work hard to project the image of perfection, shielding themselves from the kind of spiritual accountability and mentoring that could be their salvation?

How many church leaders simply assume that because a man preaches a decent sermon on Sunday, his marriage must be healthy? We in ministry need to prioritize our marriages and be the first to seek help when they are threatened. And church leaders need to become a lot more proactive in holding ministers accountable to their family responsibilities.

Virginia Tech and Bath

Last night in my Bible study group, two members were talking about the Bath school disaster. I had never heard of it. They explained that in 1927, a disgruntled school board member in tiny, rural Bath, Michigan detonated hundreds of pounds of explosives that he had secretly planted under the floors of the elementary school. Forty-five people were killed; another fifty-eight were wounded. Most of the casualties were school children in grades two through six.

There's no way we could have known that Virginia Tech was less than twenty-four hours away from a tragedy of similar proportions. We tend to think that mass murder at school is a recent phenomenon that began at Columbine High. We believe it's the product of a relationship-starved and values-poor society. We fool ourselves into believing that such things could not have happened back in the good old days, when folks lived in small towns with tight social structures, where everybody knew everybody else, and where children were taught values and all adults watched out for all kids.

The Bath tragedy from eighty years ago reminds us that we've always had people among us who have are capable of unspeakable horror: whether it's Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold , or Timothy McVeigh, or Andrew Kehoe (the Bath bomber), or the yet-to-be-named Virginia Tech murderer. My guess is that they all have one thing in common: a perception that the world had treated them so unjustly and cruelly, that their mass slaughters were justified.

Andrew Kehoe left behind a message burned into a plank of wood in a fence on his farm. It read, "Criminals are made, not born." It's an implied indictment against the grief-stricken community: "You don't like what I did, but you made me this way." I reject that. Most of us have been treated unfairly. Those who have endured severe abuse, though only a small percentage of the populace, still number in the thousands, if not millions. Nearly all of us figure out how to cope and compensate for our hurt. But a tiny, tiny minority lash out with chilling viciousness. It's not a new phenomenon. And we will see it again.

So what do we do? We join in prayer for the families of the victims, we hug our own family a little tighter, and we recognize again that this world is not our home. But we also expect to be moved by another aspect of human nature that surfaces in tragedies like this. We will hear of the heroism of ordinary people who met unthinkable horror with sacrificial courage. And we'll be reminded of the nobility of character instilled in humankind by our gracious Creator.

In Response to Your Requests

OK, it wasn't that many requests...

Oh, all right, it was zero requests...

But I know you would have requested this picture of my granddaughter Maizie if you'd known how cute she was!

IMUS t've Missed Something

The media frenzy over Don Imus's insulting remarks seems strangely out of proportion to me. Last night the NBC Nightly News devoted over ten minutes--nearly half its daily allotment--to the story. Slow news day, you say? Sure, there were no "jetliner hits building" stories to displace the Imus piece, but c'mon, folks; we are still at war and gas prices are spiraling upwards. The attention given to the Imus story was seriously over the top.

Why would I say something so jarringly politically gauche? Is it because I don't think his remarks were all that bad? Not at all. I cringe at his brand of demeaning speech and have made a personal vow that anytime those kinds of words are said in my presence, they won't go unchallenged. Or is it simply that I'm resigned to the fact that, even in these enlightened times, there is still an irreducable minimum of ignor-Imuses out there? Nope. Imus deserves to be abandoned like a South Bronx tenement by advertisers and listeners alike. Or maybe I think Imus has been unfairly singled out. That's a bit closer. I have to admit that the I-man doesn't register anywhere near Howard Stern or Tom Leykis on the Gross-O-Meter. But that's really not why I think this thing is out of balance.

Here's my theory. We have severely whittled down the SWWPUW (Stuff We Won't Put Up With) list. Most the sins that used to be cause for public censure--adultery, drunkenness, cussing, pornography, temper tantrums, rudeness, and shirking of duty--have been recast as life-style choices or at worst, adjustment problems. You just can't get a consensus on any of them any more.

So what's left on the SWWPUW list? Racism and sexism (and in most elite circles, homophobia--however that's defined). That's about it. And since Imus committed two of the sins on this truncated list (and he's a repeat offender), he got the full force of the media's outrage.

Long ago, every town square had stocks and pillories specifically for publicly shaming those who dared violate the much more extensive SWWPUW lists of the time. We don't have such barbaric devices any more, but it doesn't change the fact that the public still enjoys a good pillorying from time to time. And the folks in power enjoy dishing out said humiliation, as long as they can maintain the appearance of righteous detachment in so doing.

The whole experience is cathartic for just about everyone. You have a few people who get caught publicly expressing thoughts and attitudes that many harbor secretly. Subjecting them to public scorn helps keep the focus off the personal (and secret) sins of the rest of us. Lots of us live with the guilt and fear of exposure that are the inevitable result of our sins--even if those misdeeds were struck from the SWWPUW list decades ago. Pillorying the likes of Imus, or Michael Richards before him, provides a temporary respite from our guilt. It also allows us to celebrate the fact that we're not so stupid as to actually express our basest impulses in public.

But if anything at all is to be learned from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, it's that the secret sins are by far the more dangerous ones. Pillory Imus to your heart's content, O Masters of the Media. His words were indeed reprehensible. But don't be fooled. It is the arrogance, greed, lust, anger, jealousy, and selfishness in all of our hearts--sins so subtle, internal and unverifiable that they never made the SWWPUW list--that threaten to unravel the gossamer fabric we call civilization.