Public Displays of...What?

We settled in after a rousing round of "How Great Thou Art" for a Missions presentation from a father-daughter team who had just returned from a short-term project along the Texas-Mexico border. They spoke compellingly about the needs of the people and how they worked tirelessly for five days to address those needs.  Cute pictures of laughing children and women frying up delectable dinners over open flames outside shanty houses followed.  

Seeing these presentations in church typically makes us Baptist folks feel like we're making a difference in the world, even though we neither gave to that mission nor went on that mission ourselves.  

Just as I thought it was over and "Amazing Grace" would close the service, the lights dimmed further, and a video came on.  I was intrigued, and then...

The pastor of that small shanty community was shouting in Spanish so that all of the people standing around could hear.  He translated about every third sentence into English for the Texan folks to understand.  He was essentially outlining this man's sins for everyone to hear. It was like a third party confessional - as if someone had hacked his Facebook account and was broadcasting all of the dirt from his personal profile for all bystanders to raise their eyebrows to. He described in detail how badly he had treated his family and what kind of a lazy employee he was.  After a few minutes of this, I was glad the pastor's spoken Spanish was faster than my ability to understand his Spanish.

After quite a lengthy littany, the pastor baptized the man in "el nombre del Padre, el Hijo y el Espiritu Santo."  And promptly burst into applause and song along with the rest of the crowd.  

Sins forgiven.  Facebook profile full of sins washed away.  A fresh new start...?

I did not know this man.  The returning short term missionaries had not met that man during their week away.  But the pastor sure knew this man, and now so does everyone within earshot of that baptism.  

I get it that a faith commitment is public.  I get that cultures are different in how they express faith.  I get it that pastors are different in how they perform the rites of the Christian faith.  

But WOW - to go from an anonymous nobody to "everyone knows every sin I've ever committed" is a big leap - not just of faith.  It's like some perverse Scarlet Letter.  Everyone knows that big A is supposed to be there, but the Baptism somehow magically cancelled all that out.  Too bad baptism can't cancel out the memories of all those folks standing there and watching the video in that church.  

I think of all of the fallen businessmen, child stars and other famous folks in the news who have fallen from grace in a very public way.  I really have no need to know about who is sleeping with whom.  I don't care whether they live in LA, NY or if they're my next door neighbor.  I have no need to have a businessman's wrongs outlined week after week on NBC Nightly News.  I just want to know that justice or karma has kicked them in the backside.  

 

The concept of private self dissolves when a wrong becomes public.  A private wrong echoes through media as well as tight knit communities, and it never goes away.  

I've made some mistakes in my day.  I've spoken publicly about many of them.  I've kept a great deal more to myself.  I'm glad I made my mistakes in the pre-Facebook era.  I'm glad that they only populate my bucket of regret and not a Google search of my name.  

Private events should really stay in the private realm.  Baptisms should not be an opportunity for a public reading of your private sins. Churches thousands of miles away from small Mexican shanty towns should not be subjected to a litany of someone else's sins.  Let's fight against the trend of "no knowledge is private knowledge" and have some boundaries in our lives.  And while we're at it, let's also define some boundaries about what we know and show about the private selves of others. 

Beef - It's What's Making Me Sick

Beef - It's What's for Dinner.  This is a familiar ad I grew up with - this triggers all kinds of happy memories from grilling out to the theme song from Rogers and Hammerstein's Rodeo.  I was raised on the gold standard of beef - grass fed.  Twice a year, my Dad would scope out a prime specimen among the hundreds of unknowing bovine candidates in our pastures to become our dinner for the next six months.  He'd carefully select the best one out there, load it up in the trailer and roll off to the butcher 80 miles away.  A few days later, we'd pack empty coolers in the back of the Suburban and bring Bessie back to the deep freeze as steaks, roasts, ribs and ground beef.  

Because I was raised on such lusciously wonderful beef, I haven't been particularly impressed by the grocery store's efforts at what they call beef.  This has apparently been a lucky stroke for me.  Several years ago, I had a student who was diagnosed with a beef sensitivity, along with sensitivity to tons of other crazy things like olives.  She was a high achieving student, but reached new heights after she quit eating beef.  A couple of years later, my Mom's skin rash that had been diagnosed as Lupus and subsequently as a Latex/Lanolin allergy was so bad she changed doctors.  She was diagnosed with all kinds of crazy food allergies, including beef, watermelon and Brazil nuts.  She never eats Brazil nuts, so cutting those out was obviously not a problem - the other two were.  But after she quit eating foods she was sensitive to, her skin rash totally disappeared after plaguing her for constantly for more than 10 years. It was when my sister-in-law was diagnosed with similar crazy allergies, including a sensitivity to grapes, that I started to pay attention to my own reactions to foods I eat.  

My culprits:  almonds, soy, fruit whose juice is red, melon/squash, and...you probably saw this coming...beef. I went to the hippie grocery store last weekend (as opposed to the regular folks grocery store with lower prices and *gasp* corn fed beef) specifically to buy the good stuff.  I made this super-licious spaghetti with meat sauce to store away for lunch this week.  I've been eating it like gangbusters because of just how yummy it is.  I've been increasingly indescribably uncomfortable, and I've lost sleep because I've had acid in my mouth all night.  Then last night, I had a pretty wonderful grass-fed burger at a party along with several tums.  I think it was about halfway through the fireworks that a light bulb came on over my head that the Beef was making me sick.  I hadn't eaten any of those other foods in weeks because I'm very careful about not eating them.  It had to be the beef.  

So - this discovery doesn't really help me today.  In a few minutes, I'm off to get antacids to get me through until the Prilosec kicks in.  I've already had as much allergy medicine as I can have and stay awake for work today.  So, goodbye grass fed drips of grease down my happy hamburger eating chin, goodbye chunk of savory Sunday pot roast, goodbye to the sizzle of Ruth's Chris steakhouse, and goodbye spaghetti with super-licious meat sauce - we had a good run.  Now to find an allergist to get official confirmation of my own crazy food allergies. And more Tums.

Q-Tips: Enemy of Warrior 3

Yoga went much better today than normal.  In the past six months that I’ve been going to the Chiropractor regularly, I’ve recognized that I have one side of my spine and body that is much more flexible and strong than the other side.  That’s mainly because I have a tiny tad of scoliosis just above my sacrum.  I never guessed that clumsily leaping off a high jump mat and cracking my tailbone in the 5^th grade would echo into my 30’s. A valiant attempt to impress those 8th grade boys had become a miserable preadolescent fail.  

My main Yoga problem, however, is not my unbalanced strength and flexibility – it’s balance.  Warrior 3 is a joke for me – you want me to stand on how many feet?  Not all of them?  I’m quite sure that my instructor can feel my incredulous eyes boring a hole in the back of her head.  This whole issue, or so I thought, caused my right side balance to be much more stable than my left side balance on most days.  That is, until today. 

The past few weeks, I’ve been feeling sore in my left ear.  Saturday morning after my run, it started to get worse.  Monday I was fevered and the pain was beginning to diminish my appetite.  I noticed I could not walk a straight line down the hall.  Yesterday, I admitted to myself that I was fully into the 3^rd day of an ear splitting headache and was going downhill fast.  I left work early to go to the clinic.  After washing my ear, which felt like they were shooting a stream of water up into my eyeball with a stun gun, they made me lay on my side while they pulled out a piece of earwax larger than what should logically fit inside my tiny ear canal.  It was big.  And unnaturally gross.  It was a color that things that come out of your head should never be.  It was like a train wreck – I was utterly repulsed but I could not look away.  The culprit?  Q-tips.  The Dr. said that using Q-tips is like loading a musket with a tamping rod – it just shoves whatever is in the ear canal up against the ear drum.  Since I am a fan of really clean ears, it made sense, but I’m going to have to rethink my affection for the little white cotton covered tamping rods if this is the ultimate and super nasty conclusion of all things Q-tip.

 

After she removed the giantific ball of wax, I felt nauseous and the nurse had to hold me up because the room started spinning.  I recovered quickly, spent more than enough at the pharmacy for meds and went to bed early. This morning, after a massive dose of pain medication and my first round of eardrops since I was a baby, my Yoga practice was unfettered by any concern about my balance.  In fact, I’m wondering why I hadn’t decided to blame my ear wax for a less than stellar practice up to this point.  Warrior 3 was a one-footed miracle today – one that I don’t want Q-tips to ever steal from me again!

Pride comes before...the epic fail

This video and photo don't do this moment justice.  Seeing the moment from this angle doesn't communicate the utter hilarious failure of the runner in the orange jersey - read on, friends -  



Too soon to cruise...



This race was part of the Big 12 Indoor Track and Field Championships last weekend.  (I was fortunate enough to have tickets on the finish line! – Thank you, Johny!)   This is a photo of the finish of the men’s mile run. 

Let me set the scene: 

Indoor track meets are interesting events in and of themselves because there are twice as many laps in every event because the track is only 200 meters, so for the mile, there are 8 laps.  After several of these long races, and because there are six field events going on simultaneously, people get a little ADD and start not paying attention, but this, my friends, was like a visual magnet – you know, like how everything suddenly gets deathly quiet as you make a loud and awkward comment about something and then everyone looks at you…

Ok, back to the scent - the OSU kid (the runner in the orange jersey with #3 – heretofore known as Mr. OSU #3) had led the race for 7 ¾ laps, and you can see how close the other runners are to him – the pack was no more than ten yards spread the whole time.  It was a very close, very predictable and, well, boring race. 

Until…

It was the last homestretch, and Mr. OSU #3 glanced over his right shoulder, to the outside, and saw no one was competing with him for the last 10 yards, so he kicked it into cruising gear for that last little stretch.  Just then, Rico Loy (that’s really his name, poor thing – the runner from Iowa State), pushes through on the inside, just as Mr. OSU #3 raised his hand in this pointed victory gesture. The crowd of 2000 erupted in laughter and then in applause as Rico pulled ahead of presumptuous Mr. OSU #3  to win the race in the last three yards as Mr OSU #3 saw Rico pass. 

OSU #3 turned as red as I have ever seen another human being who hasn’t been at Padre Island for Spring Break, and he stayed that color even through the medals presentation several minutes later. Of course, he should have been that embarrassed for wearing such a god-awful color (I’m sure that their color blind coach or T. Boone Pickens chose the shade of hunter’s orange for these jerseys). 

It kinda served him right, though – you gotta keep it going through the finish!

This was not the only demonstration of this principle on this day – the Kansas State high jumper was trying to set the number one high jump mark in the nation, so the announcer kept drawing everyone’s attention to him before he jumped, and he made the crowd clap in unison before he started – well, every time he did this, he failed miserably.  Every time no one seemed to be watching, he was marevelously flawless in his approach and in his form – it was like watching the sun shine it was so natural and perfect.  Until he tried to show off for the crowd. 

So, what’s the takeaway here? 

Pride comes before the fail –

and don’t rest on your laurels
if your laurels are still 10 yards away. 

http://www.cyclones.com/mediaPortal/player.dbml?catid=-2&id=849912
this link is to the video of Rico talking about the race - he's not a great interview, but hey, not everyone can be stellar at everything -