I saw a quote about grandparents

Context
I read this at the end of Annie's Mailbox in the Shreveport Times today:

Annie's Snippet for Grandparents Day (credit Alex Haley): Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.

Commentary
I don't usually celebrate what I consider to be "Hallmark Holidays." Sure, I commemorated Mother's Day and Father's Day when my parents were still alive, but after a while you start to feel like some things were just added to the calendar to push greeting cards. Boss's Day? Really? In fact, my mother was dismayed when we lived in Mexico that there was an official Children's Day celebrated there. She was of the not uncommon opinion that every day is Children's Day. So anyway, I didn't celebrate Grandparents' Day when my grandparents were living and the last surviving one died about 10 years ago. Nonetheless, I agree wholeheartedly with the quote above and I'm glad the Annie's Mailbox people posted it.

When I got to be of teenaged years and older, I learned some negative things about my grandparents. My maternal grandfather, who I never knew, was an alcoholic. Neither of my grandmothers was particularly nice to my mother, her mother-in-law being quite picky and her mother fairly self-involved. My paternal grandfather was a little distant.

None of these things mattered when I was a child. There was nothing I looked forward to more than my week of summer vacation alone with Mimi and Papa, watching TV, playing oh-so-carefully with Mimi's china, and listening raptly while Papa gave out wisdom in his slow and measured way. My other grandmother died when I was quite young, but I still remember snippets of the times I got to spend with her, as well as still having the stuffed tiger she gave me for my third birthday. I think she made it, but that's subject to some dispute. Whatever, she was my Grandma Russell and I can believe what I want! The point is: a child loves her parents, but Alex Haley is right, grandparents are magical.

I have no children of my own, but I saw some of the same things in my mom's life as a grandparent, too. My nephew is autistic, but my mother, in the stubborn way that is common to my family, refused to believe it. He was her Alex and he was just what he was meant to be, no disability at all. Her own great-granddaughter returned the favor when my mother was suffering from Alzheimer's. Actually, I should rephrase: my mother had no problem with her dementia at all; the rest of us did most of the suffering.

Anyway, my favorite two pictures of my mother are from that time. She is sitting on the steps with Shelby, her great-granddaughter. In one of them they are leaning forward, in the other, leaning back. My sister (Shelby's grandmother) came by and asked the nominally more responsible party, my mother, what they were doing. My mom said, "I don't know," and they just kept rocking.

I guess that's what's at the heart of the special relationship between grandparents and grandchildren. It might be different if you're actually raised by your grandparents, but that generation of remove seems to help grandparents accept grandchildren as whole people in their own right, needing to be guided, sure, but never a stand-in for their personal expectations or a reflection of their own failings. Grandchildren, in their turn, think every grandparental eccentricity is just normal, possibly because they don't have to see them often enough to chafe against them.

If you still have grandparents, I hope you enjoy a special relationship with them, and if not, I hope you have some magical memories.

What did you see today?

I saw a description of a school

Context
A little over six weeks ago, the Louisiana State Legislature passed HB 976 (look it up on this site, if you like). This legislation, among other things, allows students in underperforming public schools to attend private schools using vouchers provided by the state. It is up to the private schools to decide whether and how many of these transferring students they will accept. Today I read in the Shreveport Times that the state Superintendent of Education is getting into some hot water because one of the private schools in question does not appear to have facilities to accommodate all the transfers they said they would accept.

Commentary
I am a firm believer in school choice, in that I believe parents should be allowed to enroll their children in the school of their choice. If the school is public, then children should be able to attend for free, regardless of the location of the school or the child's residence. I take something of a free market approach to public schools, believing that the good ones that attract lots of students should be allotted more tax revenue, and the ones that don't, not so much.

I like this idea in theory, but the practice might be a little tricky. C.E. Byrd, located a block from my house, has over 2000 students, double the number of any competing high school in town bar one. It is stuffed to the gills now and already a traffic nightmare, but I have every confidence that if more students were allowed to enroll, they would. Everyone wants to go to Byrd. So I can see that the same problem might occur at New Living Word School, the private school described in the Shreveport Times article linked above: they're anticipating a lot of demand.

My question is, "Why?" Late in this article by Diane Ravitch in the New York Times Review of Books, she talks about the belief some people have that private schools are, by their very nature, better than public ones. I attended a private school from 3rd to 12th grade (and college, too, but that's a separate issue), and it was academically better than the public school I started at (no link, to protect the guilty). I have also heard of people who enrolled their children in private schools that touted their superior academics and discipline, only to find that the standards for teacher recruitment were so poor that students slipped to below grade level in reading comprehension and were nearly held back a grade when they returned to their neighborhood school.

The discussion of whether private is intrinsically better than public would be academic (Hee!) if it wasn't for the fact that flesh and blood parents are trying to make decisions about their children's futures. The belief that a private school that has to compete more directly for its financial resources than a public one would provide a higher quality education is not an irrational one. Nor is there anything wrong with expressing a general preference for commercial solutions to problems over tax-based ones. It's not the way I roll, but there's nothing evil about it.

The problem comes from taking these philosophical opinions and substituting them for careful evaluation of the real choices before you. Schools, and all other institutions for that matter, are defined by more than just their revenue streams. The people involved, students as well as teachers, the physical location, even the history of a school can affect its success or failure. That's why everyone wants to go to Byrd. And hopefully considerably less than 315 kids will want to go to New Living Word.

What did you see today?

I saw a list of classroom rules

Context
There have been papers littered around the park next to my home for a while now, so I decided to go pick them up and dispose of them. Idly looking at some of them, I realized they were schoolwork for a freshman at our local high school, including a long set of rules for a math class. One of the rules was: don't criticize teachers or administrators.

Commentary
I taught high school for a year after I graduated from college, and discipline was my least favorite aspect of the endeavor. Some of that was surely because I don't like being told what to do and therefore don't like telling people what to do. This characteristic of mine is discussed in more detail in this post, if you'd like a blast from the past.

There was more to it than that, though. There was also the idealistic (and who isn't idealistic when they first get out of college) notion that what I was teaching should be interesting enough that the students wouldn't have to be forced to learn it, which is what classroom management sometimes felt like to me. Even then I realized this couldn't possibly be true all the time, and that even I was subject to discipline more than once from my favorite teacher in high school. To this day, though, it still seems like a good goal to keep in front of me when I teach. So if I concede that some classroom rules are necessary, I would like you to return the favor by understanding that the goals behind the rules are an important educational consideration.

A few weeks ago, I read Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough, which is a book about Geoffrey Canada's efforts to rescue kids in Harlem from the poverty cycle. One of the things the Harlem Children's Zone's Baby College tries to teach parents is to not shut their kids up when they ask questions. After all, as Canada puts it, that's what "rich white kids" do all the time, and it gives them an important step up in formal educational settings. This is a struggle for the parents, though, because they want to emphasize good, respectful behavior, which in their eyes includes not pestering people with questions. These goals are in conflict, but I'm foursquare with the Baby College in believing it's better to be smart and annoying than dumb and pleasant. I will confess to having more personal experience with one side of this equation than the other.

I believe that if you're trying to grow smart kids (and I concede this may or may not be the goal of any given educational institution), you have to be understand that all questions in between the poles of completely innocuous (How are you?) and completely obnoxious (Are you always this idiotic?) spring from a void or a conflict within a person. I ask why the sky is blue because I don't know, but also because it is a different color than the grass and because I know the sky is composed of air and air doesn't look blue when it's right in front of me. In other words, I'm trying to make sense of stuff. Answering my question, or at least acknowledging that it's OK to ask it, teaches me that sensemaking is an appropriate thing to do.

The same thing is true of questioning authority, or criticizing it, as the case may be. If someone's beliefs, experience and/or feelings don't mesh well with what they're being told by someone in charge, saying so is a way of making sense of how the world works. I'm not saying this means those in power always have to accommodate what we want or feel, but there's no reason to pretend we don't have those individual needs. That's why the U.S. Constitution protects our right to talk about these conflicts. I guess I'll just be grateful I was reading the rules for a math class instead of a civics one.

What did you see today?

I saw a guy checking out a girl

Context
As I was leaving the library for lunch today, a woman came down in the elevator with me and a tweenish girl who appeared to be her daughter. The younger lady was wearing the tiny shorts that are in vogue these days. As we stepped out into the alley behind the library, a gentleman in his twenties or thirties gave the girl a once-over.

Commentary
I thought the gentleman's scrutiny of the young lady was inappropriate for a couple of reasons: she was much younger than him and, as I said, probably walking with her mother. The fact that he was checking out a stranger also came to mind, but realistically, that happens all the time. Driving While Black is the term we use for unwarranted traffic stops based on the color of one's skin; perhaps I'll coin the term Walking While Female to describe the "She's on the street, therefore she's on display for my enjoyment" mentality.

Which brings me to the shorts. Is it the case that someone wearing short shorts is deliberately putting herself on display? Possibly not, because sometimes clothing that happens to be good-looking also happens to be comfortable, functional, and/or mandatory.

On the other hand, it would be silly for me to say ladies young and old don't ever try to attract male attention with their clothing. For myself, I can think of five different things I'm trying/have tried to say by wearing attractive clothing, "attractive" here being defined as smart, stylish, sexy, or some combination of those.

1) "I'm single and looking. If you're a sufficiently attractive, interesting and well-mannered guy, you're welcome to make a romantic or sexual pitch in my direction."

2) "I feel ugly (or some other kind of 'bad') today. You're welcome to pay some attention to me, as it may raise my self-esteem, but I'm not interesting in starting anything."

3) "I feel pretty (or some other kind of 'good') today. If you want to look at me and share in my general positive mood, yay! Anything beyond a look and a smile will be presumptuous, though."

4) "I'm with my husband and I'm dressed this way so he won't be embarrassed to be seen with me. You're welcome to appreciate his impeccable taste in women."

5) "I'm dressed this way FOR my husband. You're not welcome to participate at all."

Unfortunately, my actual clothing doesn't explicitly convey any of these messages, and it's probably not fair to expect guys to be able to discern the correct explanation in the amount of time it takes me to walk by them. However, I would state that it's equally unfair for a guy to assume any one of them, and refuse to give up that assumption when I make my intentions clear. I'm willing to count a little scrutiny as human nature. More than that without encouragement is just plain rude.

What did you see today?

I heard a child yelling

Context
My house is adjacent to a city park, and as such I get to hear a lot of what goes on out there. Today I heard a child yelling in the park, and as often happens, I couldn't tell if he/she was in distress and if so, whether that distress required my attention. I let it slide and continued on my way to the dry cleaners.

Commentary
For various reasons, not the least because I used to be a Girl Scout and I have my Emergency Preparedness pin, I'm usually quite willing to jump into emergency situations. Car wreck? I'm calling 911, directing traffic, and holding the victim's hand (not at the same time). Turtle crossing the road? I'm jumping out of my car and carrying him across. Hey, you define "emergency" your way; I'll define it mine.

On the other hand, over time I've become much more cautious about getting involved in volatile interpersonal interactions, which are usually what's going on if I hear one person yelling in the park. If someone falls off the slide, I'll usually hear several people yelling, so I know to run out there. But one voice gives me pause.

As I said, this has happened over time. I used to interpose myself in personal conflicts with great glee, confident that I knew exactly what to do. This has changed for several reasons:

1) I'm a religious pacifist now. At one time I was perfectly willing to counter a violent act with one of my own, or at least threaten to. That tool is no longer in my repertoire.

2) I'm very unwilling to give unsolicited advice these days. Partially this is because I hate when people offer it to me, but it's also because I often don't believe it's effective. When someone is having a screaming match with their spouse, I'm don't think they're in a place where they can hear me say they're behaving badly.

3) I'm no longer as convinced of my own righteousness. When someone's drowning, you throw them a rope, of course. But when a mother is smacking her child, and I've experienced this, she has just as much right to tell me I have no idea what her life and her child are like as I do to tell her that corporal punishment is wrong. Neither of us is wrong.

So I stay out of a lot more situations, but I don't like that solution, either. It seems cowardly and apathetic. Lately I've been trying standing near people who are in conflict and watching silently, in hopes of giving a "I'm here, I see, I'm part of what you need to consider" vibe. So I'm opening my eyes but not, unless asked, my mouth. Is that enough?

What did you hear today?

I saw ideas about education

Context
I'm still reading What Would Google Do? In the section on Google U, Jarvis posits that most useful education is self-motivated and self-directing, so the current educational model of coming to a specific classroom and learning what the teacher tells you is hopelessly outdated. He allows that our schools may have a socialization function as well as an educational one, but he thinks there are plenty of other communities and experiences that could fulfill the same role.

Commentary
OK, now Jarvis has wandered into my field, so I'm bound to get touchy. Actually, I don't want to talk about education per se; I want to dive into that "socialization" thing. It seems to me that when Jarvis looks at it, he thinks of socialization as the process of helping a student find a community, literally giving them a social life in some respect.

However, that's not entirely what we expect out of schooling, especially public schooling, in this country. We don't just want students to find some community to belong to, we want them to specifically belong to the American community. The most obvious example of our attempts to create Americans is the civics class, but there are others. Take science labs. Performing experiments in school tells our kids that they shouldn't just take someone's word for something. Or gym class, where 8-year-olds learn some of the same lessons about discipline and teamwork they would if they attended military boot camp.

In fact, the biggest battles we fight over education in this country are about what "America" is. Are we a Christian people who should be taught about God in the classroom? Are we an egalitarian people who believe everyone should learn together, regardless of skills or background? Is free speech or good discipline a more important characteristic of Americans? General school board meetings are fun, but if you really want to get a lesson in civics, find a way to get yourself on a curriculum or textbook choosing committee. Then you'll really learn what this country is all about, at least in your neighbors' eyes.

Does it make you uncomfortable when I talk about school as indoctrination? That is, in and of itself, an American thing. We pride ourselves on being free, independent, self-deterministic types. And, to be fair, the fact that we debate the issues mentioned above on a regular basis, rather than being dictated to by a small group of people or a time-honored tradition, speaks to how free we are. And also to why debate techniques are frequently taught in American schools.

What did you see today?

I saw an article about incentives

Context
Duplicate issues of magazines the library receives are kept in the staff lounge. The April 19th edition of Time, had a cover story about the results of and reactions to a series of economics experiments giving cash incentives to students in public schools. Read the article here, if you like.

What I read of the article discussed the scientific rigor behind the experiments, conducted by Roland Fryer, Jr. of Harvard, and their varied results. It also pointed that many people really disliked the idea that they were being conducted at all. Educators in particular wanted students to develop a love of learning, not constantly have a hand out for tangible rewards. On the other hand, the writer for Time said, "most adults work primarily for money, and in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than we hold ourselves." I stopped reading at that point.

Commentary
Just to kick things off, I'd like to give kudos to Time for their online archive. It is remarkably easy to find and use, and that's something librarians care deeply about.

I didn't stop reading the article because I was disgusted with the subject matter; I found it fascinating. Too fascinating, because as soon as I got to the "most adults work primarily for money" line I had to stop and think about incentives in my own life for a good ten to fifteen minutes.

Money almost never works as an incentive to me. I have taken jobs in the past just to pay the bills, but you could have given me million-dollar bonuses and I still wouldn't have done them particularly well or with any enthusiasm. In fact, my dad gave me cash for good grades a couple of times when I was in high school, and although I didn't turn them down, my internal attitude was pretty much "Yeah, whatever."

The good opinion of others works, but only from people I respect, and there aren't a whole lot of those on the planet. With the distance of years I've developed some real sympathy for people whom I didn't care for who were trying to get me to do stuff. Even when they went the punishment route, as some educators did, they found that in my perverse way I usually considered that a badge of honor.

I remember love of learning being an incentive for me, especially when I first entered school and, ironically enough, when I went to grad school in my mid-thirties. But I also remember that throughout my educational career I put special effort into any assignment I considered interesting or worthy of my talents. And I'd be willing to bet that's true of most people. The problem is, it's a moving target; what's interesting to me is deadly dull to others (Shall I talk to you about controlled vocabularies again?). And of course, my talents are different from yours.

I still believe it's a goal worth pursuing. In fact, in human resources and training materials I often read about the need to personalize rewards to the individual worker's values and goals, rather than taking a one-type-fits-all approach. So if we're going to adopt a business-type model for education, I'd rather we go with that one. And if money is what works for some students (sigh!), then why not start handing it out, if only to help them see that their individual opinions have worth? As Dr. Fryer says, let's try "treat[ing] kids not as inanimate objects but as human beings who behave in interesting ways."

What did you see today?

I heard a disparaging remark

Context
One of my flights back from the COSUGI conference lasted a little under three hours. During it, a baby on board screamed bloody murder at varying intervals. Once, he or she probably kept it up for a good ten minutes. At the end of the flight, a man in my row said, "Horrible flight!"

Commentary
I hate to fly. This may come as a surprise to members of my family because I used to love it, and I still do fly on a regular basis, but I hate it. Usually this hatred takes the form of mild anxiety, often for weeks before an anticipated trip, but it sometimes turns into full-blown panic while on the plane. All told, I prefer the train. So for me, "horrible flight" would either mean I cowered in terror all the way or the plane crashed at some point. I guess most people would agree that the latter would count as a horrible flight.

But I don't want to talk about how brave my seatmate was about flying or how tolerant I am of fussy children. I want to talk about what I think upsets both of us, which is the lack of control. Once I get on that plane, I can't control how it moves or whether it lands safely or not, and that makes me crazy. Under non-flying circumstances, one can usually deal with a screaming baby that's not your own by either walking away or trying to convince the parents to do so. On a plane, not so much.

So for both of us, perhaps the feeling of helplessness is upsetting. What's interesting is the difference in what makes us feel helpless. I've already spent too much time speculating about my seatmate's feelings, so I won't try and figure out why flying doesn't appear to bother him. I will say that generally, crying babies who aren't being abused by their parents don't bother me. In the situation on the plane, I wasn't helpless. I could have tuned the baby out or listened to iTunes on my laptop. What I actually did was feel sorry for the baby and the parents. It's just about impossible to explain to an infant what ear-popping is and how to handle it.

Which leads me to faith in general. I am a firm believer that God controls everything; that it's His world and we're just living in it. This does not, however, make me behave fatalistically. I believe every moment is an opportunity to decide whether we're going to try to participate in God's will, oppose it, or ignore it. I find I always do better when I try to participate. As I mentioned in an earlier post on patience, I find I do better when I spend less time on, "Why is God doing this?" and more on "Why does He want me around while He is?"

It's a good theory; I certainly don't always put it into practice. I often say, as Mother Teresa did, "I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much." On the other hand, as I was reminded when I read on this blog, I think sometimes God likes to remind us that it's not all about how well we handle things for ourselves. So I try to remember that too when I fly.

What did you hear today?

I saw a passage in The Grapes of Wrath

Context
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is the Big Read for Shreveport this year. The book intersperses chapters about the Joad family and their journey west in the wake of the Dust Bowl with those containing background and commentary about the wave of history.

One of the latter types of chapters contains Steinbeck's theories about how oppression creates fertile ground for the rise of collectivism. As for the oppressor, Steinbeck encapsulates his state thusly: "For the quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I,' and cuts you off forever from the 'we.'"

Commentary
The Grapes of Wrath is an interesting book. It's a polemic, but that doesn't make it any less interesting. And I agree with Steinbeck that there are things in this world that inhibit the creation of community and that ownership can be one of those things. I don't believe it's the only thing though, and I don't believe that people who own stuff are doomed to self-absorption.

I think anything we are trying to keep safe has the potential to poison our relationships with others, because it tends to create a "me vs. them" mentality. The desire to hold on to our possessions makes us believe that every person we meet wants to deprive us of them. On the other hand, the habit of evaluating people based strictly on how much of a potential threat they are to our children also erects unnecessary walls. Even the steps we take to protect our own hearts from hurt can separate us from interactions that could pay us back a thousandfold.

I'm not saying yearning for security is wrong. I'm saying that left to our own devices we tend to want the wrong kinds of safety and use inappropriate means to accomplish them. I believe we're better off commending our stuff, our children, our hearts and yes, even our community to God and trusting that He will both provide and protect, to His greater glory. So I'm not looking for the "I" or the "we." I'm going for the "Him."

What did you see today?

I saw a passage in a Stephen King book

Context
Stephen King is my second favorite author, after C.S. Lewis. Because I've read many of his books several times, sometimes I just go back and read passages again, revisiting certain concepts rather than taking in the whole work. I did this today with Pet Sematary, and found a passage describing the horror (well, it is Stephen King, right?) of leaving a young child alone in the house with a dying relative.

Commentary
This is my 100th blog entry! Hope it's worth it.

The Stand is my favorite Stephen King novel; in fact I've already blogged about here and here. But Pet Sematary is hands-down the scariest Stephen King work I've read, right up there with The Silence of the Lambs in terms of "don't read it before you go to bed" creepiness.

The passage about the little girl left alone while someone passes away is horrifying not in a scary way, but more in the "What were these people thinking?" sense the protagonist muses to himself for our benefit. One of the qualities of childhood should be the nurturing presence of adults when dealing with the harsh realities of life.

In the New Revised Standard Version of the New Testament, people are referred to as the "children of God" 14 times (yes, I have a concordance), mostly in this passage in Romans. By contrast, there are only ten reference to the "people of God" and those are all in the Old Testament, where the "children of God" never make an appearance.

What's going on here? Did we suddenly become less mature with the coming of Christ? Did we come to realize that we needed more protection and nurturing than originally thought? Or is it just a translation quirk between Hebrew and Greek? I don't know; I just know I'm more likely to think of myself as a child of God than a woman of God.

If we're children now, do we ever grow up? Maybe. In fact, that may be what happens in heaven. I've been thinking about heaven lately, inspired by a fellow Friend in my meeting. She has little patience with mainstream Christianity, and I believe some of that is because of what she considers the ridiculous imagery associated with it. So she'll ask questions such as, "Do you really believe God is an old man with a white robe?" or "What is heaven like, really?", possibly referring to the "sitting on a cloud all day playing the harp" idea.

My current view of heaven (could change any minute, my ideas on matters like these tend to be capricious to put it charitably) thinks of it as where we get to become the adult children of God. And so our views of heaven now are often similar to the ways children think about growing up. There are plenty of "I'll get to stay up as late as I want and eat candy bars all day!" visions. The harp-playing idea may come from what children often see of adult behavior in church, mindlessly mouthing praises to God and not really doing anything useful. There are also people who are horrified by the prospect of heaven: "If I can't have my whiskey and tobacco, I'm not going!" These are like children who cannot conceive of being sexually mature: "I'm going to like boys? EWWWW!"

The point is, as children we really have no idea what being a grown up is like. We get glimpses, we have hope and fears, but the reality is that not only do our circumstances change as we mature, we do as well. We'll probably even see different things.

What did you see today?

I saw a list of "bad-boy" football players

Context
I read a column by Tim Dahlberg in today's Shreveport Times in which he discussed the phenomenon of sports team owners so desperate for a win that they'll ignore "character issues" on the part of star players. He singles out three players on the Dallas Cowboys' team for specific mention: Terrell Owens, Adam "Pacman" Jones, and Terry "Tank" Johnson. The Times doesn't appear to have the column on their website, but there's a copy of it over here on MSNBC.

Commentary
Please forgive me. It's June and I have to write about football because I'm not going to be able to watch any for two more months! Even the women's season (go AfterShock!) is over!

"Character issues" is a widely-used euphemism in the sportswriting world. It basically applies to any behavior engaged in by members of a sports organization that you would not want your children to imitate. As such, it applies to a wide range of activities.

For example, police documents relating to Tank Johnson's latest arrest, as reported here, indicate that a large amount of weapons and drugs were found in his home. I won't venture to understand why Johnson took the gun charge and his bodyguard the drug one, because I'm not a member of the Chicago police. Suffice it to say, it is generally frowned upon to collect either weapons or medication illegally in your home. Especially when you're already on probation from another weapons charge.

A short paragraph will not suffice to outline Pacman Jones' "character issues." I'll just mention that the NFL as a body got so tired of owners continuing to employ him after his multiple arrests that they suspended him for the entire season last year. The Dallas Cowboys then hired him to play for them this year.

When I see Terrell Owens' name on a list with the two gentlemen described above, I feel like we're playing a game of "one of these things is not like the others." I'm not saying he hasn't engaged in conduct that some wish he wouldn't. The Philadelphia Eagles suspended him for shooting his mouth off. He engages in touchdown celebrations that the league considers excessive. But he's never been arrested, much less convicted of a crime. In fact, his only encounter with the police was when he had an adverse drug reaction that looked to some like a suicide attempt, an opinion he vigorously disputes.

I understand having to think twice about having Terrell Owens as a member of your football team, and certainly Mr. Dahlberg is entitled to editorialize on his shortcomings in that area. But listing him in the same breath with people who violate the rules of real life, not just the lofty principles of professional football (hee!), seems unfair in the extreme. After all, isn't proportionality in judgment a behavior we would want children to imitate?

What did you see today?

I saw that everyone needs God’s Word, just in different ways.

Context
I’m reading the Gospel of Luke these days for a couple of reasons. One of them is, given the fact that Luke was a physician, it can be argued that Luke is the gospel for smart people. John could probably give Luke a run for his money, but he’s not who I’m reading right now.

When Luke talks about the devil’s first temptation, he only quotes Jesus as saying, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” Luke 4:4 NRSV. For you Matthew fans out there, that means Luke skips the part about “but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4b NRSV.

Even though I'm a member of the Religious Society of Friends, I teach Sunday School at my husband’s church, First Evangelical Lutheran. I missed Friends’ worship yesterday, so I decided to attend worship at First as well.

Commentary
I’m wondering if the reason Luke doesn’t include the “every word that comes from the mouth of God” part is because he expects a smart person to figure out what else we need to live. I already know the Matthian version of the story, so I don’t have to figure it out if I don’t want to, but sometimes it’s interesting to work with a passage of the Bible to see if you come to the same conclusion the writers did.

As a person who’s concerned about poverty (not that I do much about it, but I am concerned), the “man does not live by bread alone” idea troubles me. When it comes to missionary work, it seems to me that you need to feed people before you can preach the gospel. And yet, I don't behave as if that's true. My strongest missionary support goes to Lutheran Bible Translators. Partly that’s because my husband and I have a personal connection to one of the families working in Botswana, the Megahans. I don’t think that’s everything, though. Part of me just can’t help but think that no matter how bad off you are materially, your life will be better if you can experience the Bible in your native tongue.

My experience at First today led me to believe that definition of “native tongue” can be stretched pretty far. When I want to be, I can be a pretty focused person. Twice today, I was reading or considering material for future Sunday School classes and people interrupted me. In both cases, the people in question didn’t just say, “hi!”; they made it seem that it was odd for me to be concentrating so hard. I was annoyed; I don’t come to church to be social (I don’t do much of anything to be social); I come to church to learn and teach the Word of God. I started thinking, “maybe that’s what Luke’s talking about. Besides bread, I need the Word of God. These ladies need fellowship.”

But what if fellowship is these ladies “native tongue?” Can fellowship teach us the Word of God? Do we need to share with each other what God is doing in our lives and what we wish God would do? If not, why do I have this blog, anyway?

One more story: as I was thinking about these matters after the worship service had ended, a little girl I know walked around the corner looking upset. When I asked why, she said she was sad because she didn’t get to take anything home from church. I won’t get into the long story of why she thought she should get something to take home every week, as I’m not sure I understand it myself. Anyway, after a while I handed her my bulletin, and told her, “I get to take one of these home every week. It has lots of words in it [the little girl in question can read, but she’s not going to be plowing through the book of Job any time soon], but it also has a picture. That picture will always tell you something about God. In fact, this whole bulletin is about the Word of God. Every week, you can take home the Word of God from church, and no one will tell you ‘no.’” I also told her that she could carry the love of every person in the congregation home with her which, as John will tell you, is a great way of knowing the Word of God. Hey, maybe his is the gospel for smart people!