six-word stories

Ernest Hemmingway once wrote the following six-word story on a challenge.

"For sale: baby shoes, never used."

The six word story sounds like a conquerable challenge to be sure, but this example illustrates what is involved for a good submission.  How do you place so much back story into so few words?  The sentence has to be structured in a way that pushes the reader to fill in the blanks, and in this case most of the blanks are filled in and they are all sad.  In Hemmingway's story, the classified ad device perfectly trims what would otherwise be sentences to six words.  Honestly, seven words would be orders of magnitude easier.

A few I thought of, but don't quite provide the back story depth that Hemmingway was able to generate are below.  Like Hemmingway's example, they are mostly a bit dark.  That's more indicative to what makes an interesting story than how dark my thinking is, though.

"Meet John, my twin half-brother."
"We danced under mushroom cloud lighting."
"Mute button broke. Now seeking employment."
"Neighbor found dead after eight weeks."
"She got Draco in the divorce."
"Vegetarian salad, please. Also, steak. Rare."
"Eviction: three days. Death in four."
"My love concurred all. Couldn't disagree."
"Not interested in interest. Soon bankrupt."
"She was a rock. He paper."
"Pyrrhic victory. Opponent's suffering exceeds mine."
"He on one knee. She gone."
"Doppelganger not the evil twin. Surprise!"
"One sacrifice required: everything. Now complete."

There are some decent submissions here, and most are far beyond what I have written. Do you have any ideas for a six-word story?

source of humility

We have been going over the parables of Jesus in Sunday School for the last several months, and something struck me recently.  A large number of them turn on a specific character being unable to accept his own unworthiness.  I have mentioned this before in the parable of the unmerciful servant, but it shows up in other parables as well.  In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14) the primary point is that the Pharisee is not justified because he does not see his own sin.  In the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) the older son is representative of people who wrongly believed themselves righteous.  Jesus' illustration of the plank in one's eye (Matt 7:1-6) is also a perfect illustration of the error of attempting to assist others in their errors while ignoring your own issues.

Two things spring to mind regarding this.  First, if Jesus gave so much air time to the danger of thinking ourselves more holy than we ought, this should probably be an important topic for training.

Second, I don't know that I have heard many sermons that focus strongly on the fact that we are all treacherous sinners in desperate need of salvation.  I don't mean to say that I have never heard it said that we all need Christ, because I certainly have.  It has always been as a minor supporting step leading to some other point, though.  As such, I believe that it is easy for a proclaiming Christian to dangerously underestimate the level of evil exists in his or her being that necessitates Christ's justification and sanctifying work.  Since so much important stuff relies on having a proportional understanding of our sinfulness, I think this is a dangerous position to find ourselves.

In the parable of the unmerciful servant we learn that forgiveness to others is necessary through a proper perspective of the unpayable debt we have been forgiven.  In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector we learn that the person who believes himself good in contrast to an obvious sinner is simply not justified (scary indeed!).  In the parable of the prodigal son Jesus leaves the story open at the end, but we know that most of those who the older son represented rejected Christ.  In the plank in one's eye passage we learn that we cannot help others with their issues if we are unaware of our own.

My sense is that a large percentage of the mistakes that modern Christians make, and that have resulted in non-Christians having a wrong idea about what Christianity is, springs from thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought.  We are horrific sinners saved by grace, and whose sanctification is far from complete.  If Paul was the chief of sinners I am too.  I have no room for moral superiority or boasting.

Isn't the personal humility that comes with this foundational principle of the Gospel what makes the grace offered in the Gospel such good news?  I am undeserving scum who far falls short of the mark, but God in His love and mercy offers me salvation anyway.

parenting a princess

Our daughter Cd likes princesses.  A lot.  It's hard to blame her.  At least half of the entertainment targeted toward girls her age features the protagonist in a princess role (or a girl seeking to be a princess through marriage in Cinderella's case).  Of course she is going to latch onto the fact that the female protagonists that she likes all tend to have one specific role.  I am not sure how I am supposed to feel about things like this that the kids like.

In this case, part of my complication comes from the fact that I don't truly know what the appeal of princesses is to a girl.  I understand the draw that a boy has to superheroes or sports figures because I understand pretty much all of the fundamental needs and desires those roles fulfill in boys.  While I may have some good guesses, I don't truly understand the fundamental needs and desires that are being addressed through the princess character.  Is it being pretty and wearing pretty clothes?  Is it being special, because the princess is so important?  Is it being sophisticated (which I predictably misspelled until my spell-checker caught it)?  Is it the idea of being able to have all of your desires and whims be catered to?  Is it about having the power to be able to care for those who you care about?

With the superhero character I understand the positives and negatives.  Superheroes tend to be characters of action in a black and white world, and that action is violent with little repercussion due to hidden identity, so aggression glorified is the biggest danger.  A secondary danger is that the superhero fantasy validates the view that athletic ability (through genes or through military experiment gone awry) is the basis of a man's value.  The basic superhero fantasy is that by being able to do the things the superhero does you earn respect from others and self-respect you might not otherwise have.  Also, younger boys may not get this, but the fantasy extends to being a shortcut to proving your worth to a girl (be it your own equivalent of Mary Jane, Lois Lane, or Rachel Dawes).  I feel I can parent around these and other elements of the superhero character fairly easily, since I generally understand them.

However, the princess character is sort of giving me fits.  Is a princess a noble character, and is it noble to want to be a princess?  Is CD going to learn the right lessons from a typical Disney (or similar) princess character, or is she going to pick up bad traits?  Will she learn from the very stupid decisions the characters often make, or will she learn that those stupid paths are correct?  Will she learn that a lot of the guys these girls fall for in the movies are generally the types to be avoided?  Will she fantasize too much about being in a situation where others live to cater to her desires, or learn that she needs to take responsibility for a lot of the things in her life?  Will the fact that these characters are impossibly proportioned lead to body issues?  I know that I am probably over-thinking this, and I do not want CD to miss out on experiences that other girls her age have.  I just know less than I don't know about what girls get out of the princess fantasy, and that makes me uncomfortable.

access to amusement

When I was a kid I mostly lived in rural areas and did not have a lot of disposable income, so I did not go to places like Chuck E. Cheese's, zoos, or amusement parks in general much.  We did go to some to be sure, but the opportunity to do this much was not there.  Small towns do have other things to offer, like bowling, soccer leagues, the Shriner's circus, and city pools, so I still did well.

It's in contrast to this that I notice that our kids have gotten to experience a lot of the things I would have dreamed of as a kid.  They have gotten to experience multiple amusement parks, zoos, pumpkin patches, because the opportunity was there.  In fact, we have already purchased season tickets to Silver Dollar City for the upcoming year.  This past weekend they got to visit the KC Legoland Discovery Center and the KC Sea Life Aquarium, which are two more things that are simply not accessible to a lot of kids.  Based on what I see on Facebook, though, I suspect that we do fewer events like this than the average family.

It is this contrast that is making me wonder, do kids do more things like this that back twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years ago?  When you were a kid did you go to amusement parks much (more than once a year)?  Did you visit zoos much or fairs, or Chuck E. Cheese's, or other such things?  Were there other things you did more that offset modern amusements that weren't available to you?

I'm not one to complain that kids these days have it too easy, because each generation is faced with it's own unique challenges, and there will always be individual kids in each generation that have to face enormous hardships.  I am wondering if the difference I am noticing is age-related, money-related, city-versus-rural-background-related, or something else entirely, though.

the basis of faith

What is the basis of your faith?  If you believe in God, why?  If you trust in God, why?  Is the reasoning you tell yourself or others the real reason?  Do you know?

I have thought long and hard about this a lot over the last few years.  I hear people talk about trusting in God because He has cared for them in difficult times.  What if God appeared to disappear and times got harder?  I have heard people point to specific scientific or philosophical rationales for God's existence or care.  What if those rationales were disproved?  I have heard people refer to past miraculous experiences as the basis for their faith, but what if those experiences were proved to be hoaxes or the product of people in suggestible conditions?

I will say that if there is a physical rationale that I personally give for my belief and trust in God it is that Scripture's description of our sinful natures explains humanity to me better than anything else, and every study that I hear on human nature reaffirms my view that we are deeply-flawed, selfish beings who have to resort to vanity and pride in order to behave well.  We are in dire need of a savior if there really are such things as holiness and judgment.  This is probably not the proper basis of my faith, though.

My earlier questions are important for a few reasons.  First, perspectives change as we age.  We see the foolishness in past opinions and approaches.  What is a basis of faith now may be a reason for abandoning the faith later in life.  Second, and much more important, is faith that is dependent on some earthly thing really the sort of faith that Scripture talks about?  I don't think it is.

Any person who has been to more than a handful of church services in his or her life will at some point have heard a sermon on the Hebrews 11 hall of faith.  Apart from Gideon, who it may be argued based his faith on water and wool, everyone else listed in the chapter believed in God and trusted Him just because.

For a long while I did not think there was such a thing as blind faith.  If God was God, I reasoned, we would not be able to look far before He was obvious.  I have somewhat flipped my thinking on that now, though.  I now believe that faith is a gift from God in that He is obvious on some level to those He gifts with faith.  He is not obvious to those who either are not looking for the real Him, or to those to whom He has not revealed Himself. I don't think that this obviousness is available in any other way than as something He bestows on us.  I think this faith from God is sturdy enough to withstand the doubts that other forms of "faith" ultimately lead to.

This all is not a philosophy that I am entirely comfortable with.  I like to be in control, and this cedes control to God.  This also opens me to the possibility of looking stupid because I am following something other than my ability to reason.  I can't generate the faith I need by rationalizing why God is real, trustworthy, or good, because my human rationalizations will eventually lead to making it appear that God is not any of those things.  But how does one go about asking for faith from another, or rather The Other?  Do I really want to go through the things that create and strengthen true faith?  How do I know the faith I have is not a delusion?

a-little-too-late ads

I recently purchased some wireless headphones to use with our upstairs television with some Amazon gift cards I received for Christmas.  They are working out well for their purpose, so that means that I will not need to look for wireless headphones for a while.  Don't tell Amazon that, though, because now I see ads for headphones when I am on Amazon.

This is not the first time I started getting ads for a product specifically after I purchased that product.  The same thing happened after I purchased a Roku this summer.  For a while after I made the purchase a huge percentage of the ads I saw was for a Roku.  I must have done a Google search for Roku or something like that to get those ads.

It always feels like those ads are going to waste.  It should not matter to me since it is money that I am not going to spend, and I am not funding the advertising campaign anyway, but I do not like waste.

Have you noticed the same thing with any of the bigger ticket items that things that you purchased recently?  Do you see ads for products that you purchased recently, so you will not be in the market for that item for a while?

unique as a snowflake

Any time anyone wants to talk about how important or unique each person is there is one metaphor and one metaphor only that is utilized to make the point. Of all of the trillions and trillions of snowflakes that have ever formed, all of them are unique. If they're unique, aren't you as well? There is one thing about that whole discussion that always bothered me, though.  How did they know for sure?  No one has compared anywhere near enough snowflakes to know that two are not identical.  Sure, at the molecular level it would make sense that no two snowflakes are identical, but on a molecular level no two of anything big enough for humans to see with the naked eye is identical.

Recently, I started getting curious about this metaphor and went searching, sort of expecting this to be more of a legend than truth.  It was in that search that I came across an article in National Geographic that indicated that it is probably true that no snowflakes are or have been alike.  There is obviously no real way to prove this, but there are enough factors at play that it is unlikely that two flakes ever formed enough in the same way to create two identical snowflakes.

The question I have, though, is why does this metaphor matter so much.  Why is the relative uniqueness of miniature bits of frozen water mean anything to our own uniqueness?  Why does the fact that a snowflake freezes in different ways under different factors make me as a person any more valuable or special?  Ultimately, why do we care?

The answer is probably that people are grasping at what we all hope for.  We want to be important, special, significant, one-of-a-kind.  If God created each snowflake differently, that same process must be at work in us.

Truth be told, though, it does not matter.  We are not snowflakes.  While we are unique, that is not what makes us significant.  While a person's uniqueness may make him or her feel more significant, I do not see that this truly does make them more significant.  If I had a twin that was identical to me in every way, would that make me less valuable as a person?

Really, any significance we have comes from our Creator rather than whatever about us happens to be different from the norm.  So maybe I am a unique snowflake.  Maybe I'm not.  In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter very much.