Better To Be Eaten By Chihuahuas...

Most people dread public speaking. Some simply loathe it. And there are certain select individuals who not only claim to enjoy it, but give every evidence of actually reveling in the process of speaking to an audience.

These people are clearly crazy, and should be locked up for their own protection, lest we find their existence intolerable.

But, if you absolutely have to speak to a group of people, and every way you've tried to get out of it has failed (someone brought a fire extinguisher to your well-planned self-immolation), here are some suggestions. They're not 'tips'. 'Tips' sound like they might work. With these, who knows.

1. Know your subject - this doesn't mean, be an expert. If you go to a biker's convention, a stern talk on the evils of drink probably won't go over well.
2. Know (without assuming you know) where you're speaking - I was once scheduled to give a talk at a Hilton. Unfortunately, I did not know that the city in which the conference took place had three Hiltons. I thought I knew which was the right one. I was wrong.
3. Dress for the occasion - and if your luggage doesn't make it, be sure you have time to pick up something else. "Aw, this'll work" usually doesn't work if "this" is a torn Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops.
4. If alcohol is offered before your talk, abstain - one audience is bad enough. Seeing two or three is just torture.
5. If alcohol is offered after your talk, abstain -  you're the hero of the hour for just showing up, and breath that smells like rocket fuel kind of ruins the image
6. Audience sizes vary - sometimes you really will have to say, "Good evening, lady and gentleman..."
7. DON'T imagine your audience naked - for one thing, it's inappropriate...for another thing, most people don't exercise enough
8. Intentional humor is risky - breaking wind, however, will always raise a laugh
9. Run your talk too long to avoid Q&A periods - there will be at least one person who will want to show off his knowledge by downgrading yours. Remember, it's at least a misdemeanor to physically assault a member of your audience, even if he's a jerk. "Oh, too bad, no time for questions!" are the sweetest words a speaker can hear.
10. If you have an odd name (like Budek-Schmeisser) tell the moderator how to pronounce it - And don't wince when he mispronounces it anyway
11. If you use Powerpoint, don't let anyone have access to the slides - some people have a weird sense of humor, and an unexpected view of your Uncle Fred from last year's Christmas party that your husband snuck in 'as a joke' is grounds for divorce. Or murder.
12. Don't wave your arms if you're using a stick as a pointer - some moderators stand too close to the edge of the stage. Personal experience, but they were able to put most of his teeth back in.
13.  If you're using a laser-pointer, don't play "blind the heckler" - the beams are too unfocused to really blind someone. You're just wasting your time.
14. If you make a big exit, people will remember your talk - falling off the stage works pretty well
15. If they ask you back, it's a Big Thing - it either means you were great, or you're the only person they think will be dumb enough to show up next time

And, finally, remember this...there's at least one person in the audience who wants to be there even less than you do!

Killing Babies

I used to be pro-choice.

I'm neither proud, nor ashamed of that. It was the product of wishful thinking; to wit, that a fetus in the womb was fundamentally different from a baby at the moment of birth.

The problem isn't one of Christian theology, nor the sentimental "why didn't you let me be born" ads. It's medical science as we have it today, and an ethical system that's rooted in logic and fair play, as well as faith.

A fetus in the womb begins as a 'collection of cells', but differentiation and specialization of those cells occurs quite soon, and before long there is a physical structure with recognizable human components.

Still later, those components begin to work in a fashion that the layman can recognize. The fetus moves; it sucks its thumb. It responds both visibly (through ultrasound) and physiologically (through measured parameters like heart rate) to stimuli (for example, the choice of music made by the mother). And yes, the fetus has a beating heart.

A beating heart which is in fact, or in potential, stopped by abortion.

For a time, I could make a distinction between stopping a heart which was actually beating, and a 'collection of cells' which would one day form a heart. Unfortunately for me, that distinction was pretty weak, for the simple fact that the cells in question would, if left alone, have an overwhelming statistical likelihood of becoming that beating heart.

Is it wrong to curtail potential? Our society thinks so; we have mandatory schooling for children. In the past, and even today in many countries, kids can be largely unschooled and made to work early, and inexpensively. But our laws protect their potential. There's the precedent.

My next argument was viability; a fetus that could not live outside the mother's body might be alive, but we as a society have no obligation to preserve that life. Again, precedent comes roaring in to unseat me; we can't disconnect comatose patients from life support on a whim, and we can never do it if they are expected to make a full recovery. A baby is normally expected to make a 'full recovery' from the prenatal state.

There are other arguments; the idea that it's a woman's "right to choose" goes away when the fetus is accorded a status equivalent to personhood, and passing both the 'potential' and 'viability' tests seems to qualify it. It's unfortunate, because it places a special burden on women; but men and women are different. I could try to sugar-coat that by saying that women have a higher responsibility, but having listened to young women, desperate because they're pregnant far too young, I think I'll refrain from that crass condescension.

The argument that abortion is a viable way to control population is far too chilling to be seriously admissible.

And for me, all that's enough. I changed.

If you're a Chirstian, Muslim, or Jew, you really don't have a choice; your Scriptures, if you accept them at all, give clear indication that the Almighty considers a fetus to be a child/ God "knows you" before you're born. John the Baptist "leapt for joy" in his mother's womb.

If you;'re Buddhist, it's even worse, because in a cycle of birth and rebirth, there isn't much downtime, and in an abortion you're delaying another soul by preventing it from attaining the karma which leads to Nirvana in the potential life. That accumulates bad karma for you, the supporter of abortion, and may guarantee rebirth at a lower level. Think 'housefly'.

The most troubling aspect of a change in attitude is being unsympathetic to women who've been raped, or are the victims of incest; a forced pregnancy carried to term is injury piled on injury. I can coldly say that crimes have consequences, and victims, and that it's incumbent on society to prevent the crime in the future by making the penalties terrifying. The Saudis are pretty good at this; so are various countries in Latin America, rather untroubled by the ACLU and ruminations on the rights of criminals.

It's no confort for the victim today, though, and in the same tone I would say that society can't help, within the guidelines and laws that govern its survival. I won't say I feel their pain. I don't. I can't.

And I'm sorry.

As a post-script, in looking for an image to accompany this post I did a Google search for 'abortion' images. What I saw seared my soul. There's no picture today. I just can't.

Shock and Awe With Dick and Jane

Marriage isn't easy. Take two people of different genders, with often widely divergent backgrounds and interests, glue them together with the contact cement of romance and hormones, and hope that the heat and pressure of daily life will create a lifelong bond.

Do you ever wonder at your audacity in risking it?

Since it's so hard, and so very important, there's no shortage of advice. Some is good. Some is harmless. Some of it's like using a gas can as a seat to watch the neighborhood kids set of fireworks.

One of the latter came from a TV preacher, heard today. He said that men crave respect - which is true - and that wives should have a sense of awe toward their husbands - and express it through frequent praise.

Took me a while to stop laughing.

Men, at close quarters, are not awe-inspiring. They are generally streets behind their wives in terms of emotional maturity, and usually never reach the level of emotional and spiritual commitment that women bring to the first week of matrimony.

A man's heart is typically torn between the woman he loves and the Big Diesel Pickup he saw parked at WalMart last Saturday. He'll be charming and attentive, but behind it there's usually an expected quid pro quo of either a special dinner or sex.

It's not that a man's love isn't genuine; it's just that it's filtered through an unstable atmosphere of testosterone, examples he had in childhood, and perceived social expectations which can result in a guy buying his wife an ironing board for her birthday - and thinking, truly, that he is being romantic and thoughtful.

Not awesome. Not close.

Asking a woman to be a cheerleader to a hyperannuated high school jock is, I would think, both somewhat insulting and ultimately harmful. Insulting because it's a suggestion to be, if not intellectually dishonest, at least mentally vapid.

Harmful because it'll eventually have to be false. There are praiseworthy things that every man does, and they deserve recognition, but forcing a woman into the role of an ego prop can damage her sense of self-worth - and if the praise starts to sound hollow, trust will be eroded. It's just words...but words are a big part of being 'all we have'.

So how do you show respect, in a way that's both honest and sustainable? It's pretty simple - let your husband be his own cheerleader.

Ask him how his day went, Ask him what he did in the workshop. You may not care about the '46 DeSoto that's been in pieces in your garage for the past ten years, but you care about him. Let him tell you about the wheel bearing he repacked. Learn about what he's doing, and ask informed questions.

That's really all there is to it. The time investment is minimal, the wear and tear on your integrity is no greater than trying to look alert during a boring Sunday Sermon, and by being a willing audience you'll be the person whose company he'll seek out above all others.

Isn't that why you're there?

Some Days Are Like This...

Some days, a picture is worth a thousand words...

The Calendar Restoration Company

Do you remember Richard Bach?

If you're of a certain age. the first thought that probably comes to mind is "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", the slim novel about a philosophizing seabird bent on perfecting the technique of flight. If you're a bit younger, and you're lucky, you probably remember your parents talking about the book.

Of course, if you were unlucky, your parents joyously named you "Seagull".

Before the philosophy, though, Mr. Bach produced some of the loveliest, most lyrical books on flying ever published: Stranger To The Ground, Biplane,  and  Nothing By Chance. Few pilots from the 1960s and 70s haven't read at least one of them.

In many ways, Nothing By Chance is the most interesting to the non-pilot. It's the story of how Mr. Bach and two friends decided, in 1966, to see if they could survive for a summer as 'barnstormers', flying from town to town in the Midwest, selling rides in a 1929 open-cockpit biplane.

Many hungry days and two crashes later, they found out that yes, it could be done. The dream could come true, with work and sacrifice.

But the undercurrent of the book is what's interesting - the dream behind the dream. There's a yearning there, in an America of race riots and Viet Nam and polluted air and water, for a simpler time that might really still exist. It was a hope that the calendar's pages, ripped away in passing days, could somehow be restored.

It's something that a lot of us are looking for. The hope that somehow we can find a place - not just in our minds - where Lady GaGa and American Idol and the Taliban and the Internet can somehow be persuaded to dissolve into the formless void of the future, and we can live, once again, those half-forgotten days when values were solid and adventures weren't virtual, and there seemed to be something great just over the next sunrise horizon.

There are still places like that. We call them National Parks, and they are perhaps the greatest gift that any government ever gave its people.

You can take a boat into the Everglades, and see a river of grass 150 miles wide and two feet deep, populated with alligators that would be as pleased to invite you to lunch (your treat, get it?) as were their ancestors when De Soto wandered lost through the Southeast.

You can hike from one rim of the Grand Canyon to the other, and live a timelessness that's simply eternal. (Well, aside from the green ribbon of the Colorado River...it's green because it's fed by water from the lower depths of Lake Powell through the penstocks of Glen Canyon Dam. It should be red...that's why it's called 'Colorado', after all!)

You can walk through the Painted Desert in Petrified Forest National Park, across the wide empty land to Pilot Rock, with just the sound of the wind, and your own boots for company.

America has changed, and perhaps Mr. Bach's Midwestern havens are culturally closer to a Chicago suburb that they are to the Norman Rockwell ideal he - and we - still seek. But it's good to know that there are still places where time's been persuaded to stand still, and we can still dream adventures to match our daring.

We joke about you a lot, Uncle Sam. But this one, you got it right. Thanks.

It's Not OK, But It Has To Be

Forgive, so that you'll be forgiven.

Forgive your enemies. Pray for them. Love them.

Forgive your brother not seven times, not seventy times, but seven times seventy times.

Jesus sure didn't make things easy for us, did He? It's one thing to go to church and raise your hands in worship, and talk in scriptural tags. It's one thing to forgive the neighbor whose dog keeps digging up your roses.

It's quite another to forgive the person, or people, who willfully strike out against you, or your loved ones, and who destroy lives and years.

It's inhuman to forgive a killer, or a molester. It's an abrogation of our duties to what we hold dear, to send a message that even these acts can be forgiven.

Well, yes, it is inhuman. It's Divine. And far from being a slap in the face to our values and our honor, it's the hardest way to uphold them. Sometimes dying would be easier.

It's necessary.

Not just because Jesus said so, though that alone is a pretty compelling argument. It's necessary because the quality of our mercy defines the quality of our society - it makes our world a worthwhile place in which to live. And it's the only way to build a world in which God has a place.

I'm not talking about original sin, or how God forgives a fallen world. It's simply that a Divine love which has created - and still loves - such an imperfect vessel as Man can only be welcome in a society that holds Man's life as dear as he does, because in the end, that is what forgiveness is all about.

The lack of forgiveness is the desire for vengeance, at the first level, through emotional retaliation. That's usually as far as it goes, but it's enough - since that level of vengeance is enough to deny humanity to those we won't forgive. And thus, to create a two-tier system, of the Loved and the Not Loved.

How can God take part in that?

It's hard. It feels like we're saying, "It's okay, what you did."

That's exactly right. We HAVE to be okay with what they did, for the purpose of letting it go as a raindrop falls into the ocean and is lost forever.

We don't have to hang out with them. We don't have to have Christmas with them, or dinner at Outback. We don't even have to shield them from the lawful consequences of what they did.

All we have to do is to let it go, and let go the desire to see them hurt in return.

What Would Jesus Do?

Just this.

A Special Friend

I've considered myself a Christian all my life; I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and part of the triune Godhead. I believe that He died on the Cross, rose from the tomb three days later, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. That's about as far as I ever went.

Lately I tried Bible Study to gain a deeper appreciation of the faith, and nearly ended up destroying what I had. I wrote about that a while back. It wasn't much fun, and I'm still feeling some of the effects.

The other 'issue' in my attempts to deepen the understanding of my faith was 'developing a personal relationship with Christ'.

I know it's possible - my wife has that, so do a lot of people at church, and just about everyone on Christian TV is either best friends with Jesus, or they're on the edge of being in love with Him.

But how do you get from here...a formal and respectful reverence for the Supreme Being of the Universe...to something that's "more like falling in love than giving my allegiance", to quote a recently popular song.

I asked, and was told, "open you heart and ask Jesus to come in". But how on Earth do you do that? What does it mean, to open your heart in that way, so that it becomes something far greater than the orchestration of emotions in support of an abstraction?

Should it be like opening your heart to a lost and frightened dog? I can do that easily enough, but the relationship's different - the dog's the emotional supplicant. Strike one.

Should it be like the beloved memory of a person whose voice you can hear in your head, whose touch you can feel, whose laughter and tears have the power to move you, across the miles? I couldn't hear Him, see Him, feel Him. Strike two.

But there's no Strike Three. I realized that we're all different, and for every hundred people that go into the party, that join the dance, there's someone outside, watching the occasional swirl of a dancer past a door left ajar. Someone who just doesn't mix well, who's not comfortable in the crowd, or who simply can't dance.

And that was me. When I went to parties as a younger man, I invariably ended up talking to the caterers, or walking the host's dog. I wasn't unhappy. I was just being me.

So maybe that's it. And maybe while I'm watching this party in Heaven's anteroom, the Caterer will come up and offer me a smoke, and watch with me in companionable silence.

And then, perhaps, the Hound of Heaven will come tail-wagging up, ready to play.

And I'll be among Friends.