Category: random thoughts

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The Best Sports Season is Over

College football is my favorite sport. I love the passion and excitement. I love ( and sometimes hate) the drama that each game can, and so often does, provide. I love the fact that 85% of the players on the best teams and 99% on the other teams are playing just because they love to play football and/or they love their school.. I love the rivalries and the fans.

Anyhow now I will have to wait till September for my weekly dose of spectator sports induced cardio activity. So for now I will record a few of my thoughts from the game last night. My thoughts won’t be a good as my friends Bernard or Grant ,who both offer excellent sports insights – even if they do so sporadically.

  • Watching a game with my kids when we are all pulling for the same team is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon or evening. Watching a championship game where I am pulling for one side and one of my sons has rooted for the other team for years is no where near as much fun. Actually it basically stinks. I hope Alabama and Georgia never play another meaningful game against each other, though I know that is an unrealistic wish.
  • Jalen Hurts handled being benched as well anyone ever has. He was a gentleman and a very good teammate. I was very impressed with him. Bama definitely made it to the finals in large part because of him and the way he handled being benched in the second half helped them to win the whole thing.
  • Benching your starting QB (who has pretty much done nothing but win for the past two years) for the second half of the national championship game is a strong move. Saban has the clout to make a move like that and survive, but man that was still an impressive move.
  • Georgia is going to continue to be scary good over the next several years. From the number of true Freshmen making plays for Alabama last night it looks like there is a really good chance that Alabama will simply “reload” again for next year. This should be a match up that we see several times at least in the SEC championship. I can’t imagine two SEC teams being allowed into the playoffs again anytime soon.
  • 5 Championships in 9 years is absurd. “The Process” that Nick Saban pushes within Bama definitely produces results. HT to Lindsey for this interesting article on the Masochism of Nick Saban.
  • Before the game Pam and I made a bet with friends of ours who live in Athens, work in a campus ministry at UGA, and have a son who plays in the band. We would send them cheese is Georgia won and they would send us something from Georgia is the Bulldogs won. I look forward to seeing what they send us.
  • If my friends who are Big 10 fans who live around me want to complain about Alabama being in the playoffs they should blame Wisconsin. If Wisconsin had won the Big 10 championship Alabama would not have been in the playoffs. After losing to Iowa there was little chance that Ohio State was ever going to go into the playoffs ahead of a one loss Alabama team. The University of Central Florida has a better argument but I wasn’t surprised that they were left out of the playoffs.
  • While I am glad that Georgia’s Tyler Simmons was called offsides, he sure didn’t look offsides to me. Of course, all dealing with bad calls is a part of the game.

Anyhow Roll Tide Roll!

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The History of the SEC Chant

A few years ago I posted concerning why I believe SEC fans chanted SEC. The post is here and it is consistently one of the most read posts on my blog. Yesterday Kirby, a friend and former neighbor, posted this article from ESPN concerning the actual history of the SEC chant. I remember Arkansas chanting this during their basketball championship runs but I didn’t realize that was most likely the origin of the chant. So I guess I am thankful for something that has come out of Arkansas. Who knew?!?!?

Most of my friends and acquaintances around here don’t care that much about college football, unless Wisconsin is winning (which most years means they don’t care very much 😁), so they usually don’t get the whole SEC chant thing. I suspect they will hear a great deal of “S!E!C!” tonight. I sure hope Bama wins, but no matter what it is going to be a fun night watching the game with my Georgia loving youngest son and chatting about the game on Twitter and Facebook with my SEC loving friends around the nation.

Roll Tide Roll!

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Freeze Your Credit

Pam jokingly refers to Clark Howard as my “man crush”.  I do really like listening to his podcast and I definitely often recite some of his financial wisdom to other people around me. For example, today as we were tearing down our equipment from Tapestry‘s Sunday morning gathering I talked with a couple of “threads” concerning some of Clark’s advice. In this case the advice was to freeze your credit.

Here’s Clark Howard’s guide on freezing and thawing your credit at each of the three major agencies.

I wish it didn’t cost anything for us to freeze our credit because it shouldn’t. The credit agencies should not be able to charge me to keep them from selling personal information they have about me that I didn’t give them permission to gather. Perhaps the state that you live in agrees with this sentiment and has told the agencies that they can’t charge you for the freeze or the thaw. Wisconsin allows each agency to charge $10 for freezes and thaws. Still it is money well spent because it is the best way to protect your credit. It keeps people from being able to pretend to be you and take loans or apply for credit cards in your name.

Anyhow, go read Clark Howard’s post and then freeze your credit.

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Mushrooming Hope

Since moving my blog from the church site (sptapestry.org) to my own private site (raterrell.com) I have once again been consistently blogging. It is the last day of 2017 and therefore I should follow stereotype and blog about one of two things: 1) the past year, or 2) my hope for the coming year. I choose number 2.

Last night I began reading Rebecca Solnit‘s “Hope in the Dark” and she referenced mushrooms. Solnit wrote:

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus.

Andy L is my local friend who hunts mushrooms. This is one of the mushrooms he found this fall.

The mushrooms sprout up from a fungus that has been doing all the work unseen underground. The fungus has formed a healthy underground foundation from which the mushroom fruits. That fruiting fits with how I understand hope.

Hope works in such a manner that it leads to behavior that encourages the hoped for outcome. Hope isn’t just day dreaming. “I hope ‘something’ happens” is not the same as “I wish ‘something’ happens”. Wishing is day dreaming. It comes out of a desire to have something happen with no cost or personal effort. Hope isn’t Pollyannaism. It isn’t optimism, which is basically just a positive version of determinism. “It doesn’t matter what I do, everything will just work out in the end.”

Nope, hope is like the fungus under the ground. It leads to action and behavior that will make sure everything is ready for when the rain comes and it is time for the mushrooms. We can’t control the rain and thus we can’t determine when, or if, our hope will ever “mushroom”, but hope leads to us “preparing the ground” for when the rain comes. Hope leads to planning, effort, and sacrifice. As I say at Tapestry every so often (I said it this morning), for the Christian hope involves us living out the future (that we believe God will bring about) in our  present. Hope leads to practice.

Pam talks to her students all the time about “best practices“. I know this because Pam, Adam, and Noah, who are all in the same field of study, use the term in about 3/4s of their conversations (a lot of the Terrell conversations are about Speech Language Pathology – No, I’m not bitter). Anyhow, I know many fields of study focus on “best practices”.  These practices are behaviors and actions that are generally accepted as producing better results than the other comparative practices and behaviors. I believe that hope should lead to us living out “best practices” in our lives. We do the things that are most likely help us to produce the best underground foundation to be ready for the rain and the fruiting (by the way every time I say the word “fruiting” all I can think of, thanks to Pam, is Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire). Not to do best practices has more in common with wishing.

Hope and best practices go hand in hand. We hope to be closer to God, so we begin to practice what is best for spiritual growth. We hope to be closer to our families, so we learn the best marital, parenting, and family practices and begin to live those out. We hope to grow in our friendships, justice, intellect, education, peace, finances, careers, hobbies, and other things, so we learn the best practices that help in such fields and try to practice them. Thereby, we prepare for the “fruiting”.  That “fruiting” may be beyond our control, but preparing for it isn’t.

So that is my hope for myself, my family , and all my friends, that we would live out mushrooming hope in 2018. If we do we will be ready for when the rain comes and the fruiting begins.

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Pop Faith Is Posturing

Thanks to The Companion Shop Clive now has purple feet for our winter walks.

Today while walking Clive I was listening to the latest podcast episode of On the Media.  This episode, “The Feelings Show“, is their end of the year episode, and consists primarily of some of their favorite interviews from 2017. One of those interviews was with Radiolab co-host Jad Abumrad, and Jad’s brother-in-law Eugene Thacker concerning Nihilism in our modern culture. Tacker wrote a book on the horror genre and confronting the unthinkable of our world (i.e. Nihilism) titled “In the Dust of this Planet“. Tacker made the following statement that had me thinking during the rest of Clive’s walk (Clive was too busy sniffing things to be distracted by the quote). Tacker said:

Yeah, I would go with that. …I think that that is nothing more than a posture…. and that’s why it’s in pop culture because that’s what pop culture is.

To mildly paraphrase Tacker – Pop culture postures. Pop culture tries to convey deep meaning without the work necessary for actual meaning. So it strikes a heroic pose while avoiding the actual sacrifice of true heroism. It tells love stories that focus on the intense, emotional feelings while avoiding the hard work of genuine commitment. It puffs itself up and tries to look much bigger and more meaningful than it actually is. As I paraphrased Tacker at the beginning of this paragraph, pop culture postures.

I meet lots of people who like to posture meaning. As a teen I loved things that looked deep. Of course, I just wanted to look deep, not actually put in all the time and effort necessary for actual depth. Real meaning takes work. Posturing meaning would be one thing if just teens did such posturing. Unfortunately, many of us adult continue to strike poses instead of actually becoming people of depth. Doing things that look meaningful is so much easier than doing the hard work necessary to actually live meaningfully.

This is part of what bothers me with pop spirituality, it postures significance. Whether it is Christian pop spirituality or pop spirituality from other faith backgrounds I believe it generally postures significance. I’ve written more about this in two previous posts (“Sentimentality vs Faith” and “ARGH! Sentimentalism“) so I won’t write about it again in this post.

One of my favorite parts of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is how things are “Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike” something. Pop faith is like that with real faith.

In my opinion, the danger of posturing faith/pop spirituality is two fold. First, since posturing only merely looks like the thing you are poising like it, but isn’t actually the real thing, it doesn’t really hold up when times are difficult. Pop faith is built on sand and can’t stand through storms, Storm facing faith takes digging down and building a solid foundation, and that requires effort, sacrifice, and most importantly trust (Matthew 7:24-29). Trust takes time and experience.  Secondly, pop faith is dangerous because it looks just similar enough to meaningful faith that it can keep us from actually developing the discipline of meaningful faith. After all, if you don’t have to work at real faith and can just get if from posturing, why would you choose effort and sacrifice?

We only have one more day of 2017. In 2018 I hope each of us is able to give up whatever postures we tried to maintain during the past year.

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It’s The Thought That Counts

Pam, Adam, and Noah seriously kick butt when it comes to gifts. More than a decade ago we as a family started following the 4 goals of Advent Conspiracy for our guidelines for gift giving. Then when we got to be a part of starting Tapestry we led the church in those guidelines. The 4 advent Conspiracy goals are:

  • Worship Fully
  • Spend Less
  • Give More
  • Love All

So when we give gifts to each other as a family we really try to focus on the thought behind the gift. We want our gifts to each other to reflect something of ourselves and to reflect that we truly know the person we are giving the gift to. To be honest I am nowhere near as good at this as Pam and the boys are. They each amaze me each year with their ability to find simple gifts that do an amazing job of reflecting who they are and who the recipient of the gift is.

I thought I would quickly share their gifts because I think they are great.

First, Pam’s gift to me.

The hat you see on my head is a Stormy Kromer. Pretty much the quintessential Mid Western Winter hat. I have wanted one for years but I simply could never bring myself to spend $45 on a hat. Forty-five dollars is not a ton of money, it isn’t really an extravagance, but I am a very cheap person. Therefore, $45 is more than I could ever convince myself to spend on on a hat that probably won’t keep my head any warmer than a $5 toboggan (Wisconsin friends, we Southerners call knit caps toboggans). Pam told me several times to just go ahead and buy one, but I have felt stupid for wanting to spend that much on a hat. So Pam bought one for me. She knows me.

I’ll go with Noah’s gift second since as the youngest child he usually gets mentioned last.

Noah bought me a painted tile of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” with a basset hound in it. Noah knows that Van Gogh is one of my favorite painters and anyone who knows me should have found out early in our relationship that I love basset hounds. Last year Pam had the great idea of making a corner of our den the odd basset hound corner. We put photos and prints in this corner that are weird basset hound images. Like a basset hound with antlers and a civil war basset hound portrait. The tile is a wonderfully odd addition to the corner. Noah knows me.

Finally, here’ Adam’s gift to me.

That is a hatchet that is presently on my wall. Actually it isn’t just any hatchet, it was my dad’s hatchet that he kept hanging in his shop. It was covered with dust and grim from decades of work. Adam took it from Dad’s old shop when we were there to help Mom pack up stuff for moving. I was with him in at the time and was glad that Adam wanted the hatchet. What I didn’t know was that he was going to put some serious work into cleaning it up, bringing out the patina of the metal and the wood, sharpening it to a very fine point, and then finish it off for me as a gift. It is wonderful. Adam knows that such nostalgic items matter to me because Adam knows me.

These gifts weren’t real expensive but each one reflects a great deal of thought by the gift giver. They didn’t simply go out and buy a gift that cost a certain amount. They thought about who I was and what type of gift would reflect that they knew me. Like I wrote earlier Pam, Adam, and Noah kick butt at this.

SIDE NOTE – I regularly listen to a podcast about serial killers (The podcast is titled simply enough “Serial Killers“). Thanks to this podcast I now understand that the main reason that there were lots of people killed by serial killers using hatchets in the past and not now is just because every house had a hatchet for cutting kindling for their wood burning stove. The hatchet was a handy weapon that was usually found at the house. Obviously it isn’t a handy weapon anymore and thus you don’t hear of modern day hatchet oriented serial killers. I assume Adam’s gift doesn’t put us at risk. 🙂

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Spectrum of Sexual Misconduct at Work

Listening to an NPR Marketplace episode (a show/podcast that I would highly recommend everyone listen to) and they talked with Dr. Kathleen Kelley Reardon concerning an old and a new article she had written. The old article from 1993 is “The Memo Every Woman Keeps in Her Desk” and the new article is “Spectrum of Sexual Misconduct at Work“. Both are good but I want to briefly mention the later article on the spectrum.

I think it is very helpful for the current much needed conversation concerning sexual harassment that our culture is experiencing. The term sexual harassment is just too vague, covering behavior that ranges from awkward to criminal. All of the behavior needs to be addressed but that doesn’t mean it should all be addressed in the same manner. Obviously some of the behavior demands criminal charges and prison time, while other behavior needs to be addressed by termination, and still other by reprimands.

Dr. Reardon’s spectrum is as follows:

  • Non-offensive
  • Awkward/Mildly Offensive
  • Offensive ( Not necessarily or overtly intentional)
  • Seriously Offensive (Intentional lowering of women’s value)
  • Evident Sexual Misconduct
  • Egregious Sexual Misconduct

Obviously I am not an expert on this subject nor am I someone who has to deal with much sexual harassment. Though as a husband, friend, pastor, chaplain, and human being I do worry about the sexual harassment of anyone. Someone being sexually harassed should be the exception rather than the norm. Personally, I think Reardon’s spectrum is a good addition to the discussion and hopefully the discussion will reduce the amount of harassment people, especially women, face.

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In Praise of Boring Lives

Today I watched “The Last Jedi” with my boys. I love watching hero movies. It is fun and exciting to watch people, even fictional people, overcome great obstacles and achieve amazing things. I cheer for them to be heroic.

But we don’t praise the boring, mundane, and ordinary.

We don’t typically write New York Times best sellers or Blockbuster movies about the mundane. I get why. We want excitement in our entertainment. We don’t usually make heroes of the ordinary. Who wants to hear a story about a person getting up grabbing some breakfast, doing his/her work, coming home and spending some time with family and friends, then going to bed to rest up to do the same thing the next day Not many people want to hear that story over and over. We praise and glorify the extraordinary.

But such moments are called extraordinary because they aren’t ordinary.

The ordinary is what most of us do 99.99% of the time and therefore it is who we are 99.99% of the time. We fix a meal that we have had many times before. We say “hi” to our friends and families as we have done many times before. We cut our grass, shovel the snow off our driveways, walk down the stairs of our apartment buildings, buy our groceries, walk our dogs, feed our cats, pay our electric bills, and do all sorts of ordinary things during the majority of our lives. Acting like such mundane tasks aren’t very important, even though they make up the majority of our lives. So we praise and glorify the extraordinary.

We don’t lionize the ordinary because it doesn’t make for an exciting story, and I believe more importantly, because if we praised the ordinary, then we would suddenly have to hold ourselves accountable for whether or not our ordinary lives are praiseworthy. Not many of us have a chance to live a heroic moment, but all of us have the chance to choose whether to live our regularly daily lives in a heroic manner or not. Sometimes it seems that the person who actually faces a heroic moment and responds well to that moment has a difficult time living out a good and decent life in their ordinary choices. Kind of a heroic milkshake duck, a hero for a moment but a jerk for most of their lives. All of us can choose to live our mundane and boring in a manner that extends loves to those around us by living in a sacrificial manner that puts others first. So we must ask ourselves “What if I live the ordinary in a pretty crappy manner?” Does that mean that we are living 99.99% of our lives in a crappy manner?

So we praise and glorify the extraordinary … in hopes that praising and glorifying the extraordinary will turn the attention away from our mundane and boring. But the mundane and boring are really who we are.

I believe that is part of the significance of the Incarnation of which Advent reminds us. That in the Incarnation God claims the mundane and boring. Yes, Jesus did the most significant things ever, and He was, and is, extraordinary, but He was also mundane and boring. Think about it, we have years of His life that were never recorded. God incarnate walking on earth in such a manner that next to nothing is recorded concerning the age of 2 and 30. We don’t have stories of Jesus doing His chores, or walking His dog (I am sure that Jesus is a dog person), or dealing with His crazy cousins The Incarnation brings the mundane and boring into the nature of God, and I am convinced that Jesus lived out His boring and mundane in a praiseworthy manner. Jesus didn’t just live sacrificially during the passion week of Easter, or during the three years of His ministry, but during his entire boring and mundane life before the time described by most of the gospels. His boring and mundane were praiseworthy because He was living out the will of His Father 100% of the time.

I think many people would describe my life thus far as an accomplished life. I have accomplished a few things in my 50 years of life that I am pretty proud of and there are still others things that I want to do. Yet I believe the most significant things that I have done are the boring and mundane things. The boring and the mundane show who I really am.

Our extraordinary moments are just that, moments. But the boring and the mundane, that is who we really are. May we (may I) live the boring and mundane in a praiseworthy manner