Monthly Archives: December 2018
Help One Another
My earliest memories are of traveling…junkets to the lake or beach with my family to collect sea shells or go fishing. We never stayed overnight anywhere because we couldn’t afford to do so, yet those short trips within an hour’s drive of home ignited a sense of adventure and broadened my horizons to see there was more to the world than the four blocks around my house.
Fast forward to college and a kid from the wrong side of the tracks scraps together every spare dime to make sure she could travel: Belize, Panama, New York City. $400 may not seem like much, but to a poor kid it was a king’s ransom. Scholarships and grants helped finance those long ago trips as part of my college curriculum and the lessons I learned have helped me develop as an individual and as a successful teacher in a small rural school. The music and art and cultures I experienced helped me understand myself and others in ways that merely reading a textbook never would.
But not every student gets those rare opportunities. Sometimes it’s a location problem and there are no beaches or lakes within driving distance. Sometimes family finances have to focus more on food and shelter and clothing than expanding a child’s mind and thirst for knowledge. Sometimes it’s a cultural issue and families fear to let their child make a long trip faraway. But for a few kids, getting an opportunity to travel to somewhere exotic is a once in a lifetime possibility, and it’s a opportunity that creates a thirst for learning and college.
I’m taking a group of yearbook students to Japan during spring break 2020 and they could use your help. Be a sponsor or make a donation. Give them a chance to see the world. Most of these students are first generation college students. By that, I mean they are going to be the first in their family to attend college and the obstacles to make that happen are huge. Travel is a good way to help them experience and understand there is more to life than what they see at home.
Why Japan? It’s a STEM and photography culture and we are striving in Roscoe to encourage young people to train in STEM fields. As yearbook, I want them to develop a photography mindset—that everywhere you go is a story to photograph. Seeing is believing and helping them see is half the battle to get them to college. They are working hard to raise the funds, but small rural communities are limited in what they can provide and do. That’s why we need to help one another.
I’m not a socialist. I don’t believe the wealthy should pay for everything, but I do believe in neighbors helping neighbors. That’s the way the West was settled and that’s the way the West thrived. So if over the next few months you have a few extra dollars, why not make a donation to these eight kids and help them raise the $4,000 each they need to make a dream come true. (One hundred percent of the funds raised goes to the trip for the student)
Just click on a link.
Good is Not Safe
I’m a huge fan of classic literature with its clear-cut boundaries between good and evil, where heroes are true heroes with an uncompromising moral code, even if they make poor choices. The current brand of literature with its villains as heroes isn’t something I’m going to pick up and read or watch.
But we have to ask the question: why has literature devolved into the idea that good is weak, safe, soft and definitely less powerful than evil?
I think it has its roots in a core belief that God Himself is weak and powerless. Not because He is, but because we desire Him to be.
A namby-pamby God isn’t someone we need to be afraid of or someone we need to obey. A “Santa Claus” kind of God gives us what we want without asking anything in return and thus, we can despise and belittle Him because He’s good and will “turn the other cheek.”
The turning the other cheek applies to humans – not God.
Good isn’t safe. Good does what’s right and best regardless of circumstances, abilities, beliefs, or what other people think or want. Good is the most powerful force in the universe because it can’t be bought, corrupted or diverted. And that scares us. It’s why we need flawed heroes – the worse the better because then we don’t have to change; we don’t have to be accountable.
People have a problem with God because of their need to defend their individual rights. We don’t want anyone to interfere with our right to do evil. We want to justify our actions, attitudes, and beliefs without having a universal standard of right and wrong simply because we’re the weak, corruptible ones.
I tell my writing students all the time that if a hero isn’t morally good, he isn’t a hero—just another guy who can occasionally do heroic things. A true hero has self-control. A true hero protects and cherishes everyone, all the time, and puts his needs and wants in a secondary position.
But this post isn’t about heroes. It’s about God and how He is the source of good and therefore He is not safe. He will do whatever it takes to conform us to the image of His Son and that may not conform to our ideas of what is acceptable. Like little children we want cotton candy all the time and refuse to eat our veggies.
God is good, but He is not safe, nor is He powerless, weak or limited. He will transform you. He will change you. He will conform you to the image of Christ. Good is not a pushover.
Through Alien Eyes 