Blessings to you on the first night of Rosh Hashanah! Rosh Hashanah is the celebration of the Jewish new year. Leviticus 16 sets the celebration apart as a yearly fresh start.
…In the seventh month, on the first of the month, there shall be a sabbath for you, a remembrance with shofar blasts, a holy convocation. -Leviticus 16:24
As the Jewish new year begins I hope you’ll enjoy the following video which I loved!
You might not know it, but today is “World Alzheimer’s Day.” This day is spearheaded by an organization called The Global Voice on Dementia. You can check them out at: http://www.alz.co.uk/ This has become a global concern that even the UN has taken notice of, and this week they are addressing it for the second year in a row.
The most recent stats claim that there are currently 30 million people who suffer from dementia, and there will be an estimated 100 million people by the year 2050.
If Alzheimer’s has not affected you or your family, there is truly no way to adequately communicate how painful, hard and devastating it is on the whole family. As the days go by, there seems to be less and less of the person you knew and loved “at home” in their body. To live through the deterioration causes you to ask God some serious questions. Walking through the effects of Alzheimer’s when it came to visit my family, has left all of us changed…it was a very long and hard journey.
I think that is why I had such an instantaneous reaction to Pat Robertson’s remark about Alzheimer’s this week. A man whose wife had Alz indicated that since his wife was no longer “there” he was moving on with his life, and wondered if it was okay to divorce her since there was not a tangible relationship anymore.
While Pat has made some pretty embarrassing news remarks over the years, which have often given Christianity a black eye, when he said it was okay for this man to divorce his wife since Alzheimer’s is a “kind of death” I was speechless.
When we reduce love and commitment to a formula that says, ” I am only in this as long as my needs are met, we have absolutely missed what it means to follow Christ with our actions and choices.
This kind of ethic-less thinking means that if you are not able to do for me what I want, regardless of a medical diagnosis, then I have no moral or ethical responsibility to stay in a relationship with you. Unfortunately I have actually witnessed couples divorcing months after a marriage began because one spouse got cancer, and the leaving spouse knew his sexual needs wouldn’t get met.
Amazing…bad form…wrong…selfish…ugly…
This reveals how me-centric we have the capacity of being, and how desperately we need God to help transform us into men and women who choose truth and sacrifice over self, ease or comfortability.
Do you remember the old “Lifeboat” analogy we grew up with…where there was a diverse group of people in a rescue boat, from teachers and lawyers, to disabled and jobless. The Lifeboat dilemma was that the boat was overloaded and some of the people had to go…the question to process through was…which life was truly worth saving. Welcome to ethics 101, and throw in a dash of situation ethics as well.
When we think life can be trimmed down to easy answers and flippantly decide which people deserve our love; which people deserve our unconditional commitment, and what is the loop-hole I can deploy when life get tough, we reduce our humanity to something more animalistic.
The man who Pat gave a get-out-of-marriage free card to, might have felt some relief for a while, but I think soon he will be flooded with other feelings that are not quite so life-giving. I know the weight and burden the loved ones of Alz patients carry is immense, but life isn’t devoid of pain. Instead of running from the pain and the feelings, real life it’s about who we are becoming through the pain.
You see God has placed His own source code into the hearts of us all. While we are good at tricking ourselves, living in denial or avoiding the questions of the soul…when the night spaces come, our heart is crying out the questions unleashed by the divine DNA within us, and we know that there are truths that exist beyond our comfort zones and our ability to justify.
Every life matters because every life has its genesis in the creative imagination of God. We have the opportunity to most reflect the God-reality within us when we choose love, life, to invest in those considered un-worthy, to love those who seem un-lovable, and to stay committed to those who we made a covenant with and are unable to reciprocate because of something as devastating as Alzheimer’s.
In a very real way, God demonstrates the opposite advice that Pat gave. As God looked at broken humanity that struggled with a complete disconnect from the divine, He could have said, “Well, their sin situation is kind of a death, so I don’t need to stick around.” Fortunately for us He didn’t. In fact in Romans 5:8 we read:
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Then in chapter 6 verse 23 Paul reminds us: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” So when we were considered “dead” that is when God’s extravagant love went into overdrive, not into a me-centric justification for non-involvement.
The life-giving model we see in the choices of the Father and the Son is to preserve the beauty and sanctity of life…not look for loop holes to disengage.
May we raise our awareness, compassion and love and stay committed to the ones we love, especially those with whom we said, “Til Death do us part.”
Dei Gratia…Monty
This is an interesting piece of research…in our culture we joke about "shopping therapy" all the time. There are many people who also struggle with a shopping addiction.
We are trying to "feel good" about ourselves or we are trying to medicate our reality with the various addictions and dysfunctions that assault us…but in the end the things that we feed ourselves never satisfy, they only create a greater hunger or need for more.
In reality, what we really need is to reconnect with God, the only true source of joy regardless of circumstances. In this article they make the connection that our happiness greatly increases as we enter into spiritual experiences in comparison to our cultures remedy of shopping to fill the void…check it out it is pretty interesting.
Monty
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RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Can money buy happiness?
No, and neither can spending money, suggest researchers from Ben-Gurion
University in Israel. Their as-yet-unpublished study took a look at
consumer shopping habits over the last three decades and compared it to
participation in religious activities, and found that, among women,
money makes us much less happy than going to church.
THE DETAILS: The authors used data collected by the
University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Council. The Council
conducts a "General Social Survey" annually or biannually, and collects
information from a sample of adults over 18 on their happiness levels.
Looking specifically at adults who lived in states where "blue laws"
(laws prohibiting commercial activity on Sundays) had been repealed
between 1973 and 1998, they compared the happiness levels of adults with
reported church attendance over that 25-year period. (Because
Christians are most likely to attend church on Sundays, while Jews and
Muslims normally attend religious services on Fridays or Saturdays, the
researchers looked specifically at Christians for this study.)
Women, but not men, seemed to experience a steep decline in both
church attendance and their happiness levels over the course of the
25-year post-blue law period. The data showed that blue law repeals
decreased the likelihood of people reporting that they were "pretty
happy" to "not happy" by at least 17 percent. But the authors also noted
that people whose religious participation didn't change after blue laws
were repealed reported no drop in happiness levels. Using other data
collected from the survey, the researchers ruled out the possibility
that the declines could be related to women's increased participation in
the workforce or to family issues.
WHAT IT MEANS: We could all stand to take a "day of
rest" from commercialism to get some perspective on what makes us truly
happy, whether we consider ourselves religious or not. For those who
attend them, religious services provide fellowship and often give people
a greater sense of meaning to life, says Danny Cohen-Zada, PhD,
assistant professor in the department of economics at Ben-Gurion
University and lead author of the study. And he adds that although his
study looked only at people who identified themselves as Christian, the
relationship between religion and happiness would likely hold true for
women of other faiths as well.
But if attending services makes people happier, why don't people go
more regularly, or go back if they've stopped going? Cohen-Zada has a
few theories, he says, foremost among them is simply that shopping
provides more immediate gratification. "Since immediate satisfaction
from shopping is higher than from religious participation, they choose
shopping even if they know that in the long run they would be less
happy," he says. "In addition to this, the addictive nature of shopping
helps them to choose the immediate lower satisfaction over the long-run
higher satisfaction." In the long run, he says, "People derive greater
satisfaction from religious participation than from shopping. Our work
contributes to the idea that money is overrated, and other factors,
including religion, tend to be underrated."
Here are a few ways to avoid falling into the trap of turning
to shopping as a way to derive some immediate gratification and a false
sense of happiness:
• Institute your own "blue laws." Whether you choose
Sunday or some other day of the week that better fits with your
schedule, designate one day of every week as a no shopping day. (And
yes, that includes shopping online.) Instead, use that day to spend more
time with family or to find some other activity you find fulfilling. A
study published earlier this year even suggests that it could make you
more attractive in other people's eyes: The study found that people who
are considered more experiential, meaning they spend money on
experiences rather than things, are more attractive than materialistic people.
• Find religion, whether you're religious or not. In
his study, Cohen-Zada found that for each point increase in
church-service attendance, self-reported happiness increased by 10.7
percent. Even those who don't consider themselves religious can tap into
that happiness factor through prayer or meditation,
says Rodale.com advisor Jeffrey Rossman, PhD. He suggests sharing your
feelings with a higher power—even if that means "the universe" or a
wise, caring part of yourself. Doing so allows you to open up to
something greater than yourself, and eases the feeling that you need to
bear every burden on your own.
• Take a walk. We've all been known to indulge in
"retail therapy" when we're feeling unhappy. But as this study suggests,
buying things, or even engaging in the simple act of shopping, doesn't
provide us with long-term happiness. The next time you're tempted to hit
the mall to relieve stress, imagine yourself late in life looking back
on what you buy, and you'll probably realize that stuff will provide you
with very short-lived satisfaction. Instead, call a friend to chat,
head to your house of worship, or simply go for a walk. Multiple studies
have shown that time in nature makes us happier, anyway.
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hhmmm, so I guess I'll see you at church this Sunday 🙂
Monty
Many people wonder what the big deal is about social media. Others wonder what social media is, while others are twittering, facebooking, myspacing, digging, youtubing, tumbler-ing, friendfeeding, kindle-ing, blogging….the list seems endless!
Social media played a powerful role in the last election, not only in votes, but in donations. Social media has, in many ways, changed the way we interact, reconnect with friends from ages past, and have interactions on some level with people who are continents away, as well as in the other room!
As I look at the fabric of social media, I see opportunities to create change by connecting with people of like mind and heart. Not only do you get to connect on a social level, but you are also able to connect "tribal-ly" whether you want to be in a "conservative or liberal tribe," a "vegan or a red-meat tribe," or even a "online or a board gamer tribe." The type and affinity of tribes is limitless, and the potentialities of what a tribe that is focused can do is amazing.
The ability to create and form tribes is the catalyst that can change the world, it has already changed the rules of almost everything we experience.
Seth Godin, an entrepreneur, writer and blogger, has written some fascinating books. From "Purple Cow, and the Big Moo" to his new book "Tribes." He is the creator of Squidoo, a web site where uses share links, ideas and so much more. Take a moment and watch this video of Seth giving a talk about "Tribes." In the video Seth argues that the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a
human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared
ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and
make big change. He urges us to do so.
Dei Gratia,
Monty