An Unexpected Vacation

Time on my hands

Arrived unexpected,

Vacation forced

By thoughts disconnected.

Time for repose,

Or those chores to be done,

Honey-do lists 

And errands to run?

Days in idle

Productivity weaned;

Old books to read

New ideas to be gleaned.

Thinking, musing,

Pouncing on pondering,

Mind’s gymnastics,

Creative wandering?

Z-z-z engulfed me

Mid-morn to afternoon;

Back to routines

Could not get here too soon.

Time upon time

Through desultory days

Work thoughts and I

Quickly parted our ways.

Not my idea

This unearned vacation,

A beastly thing,

An awful creation.

Spill beans I must

That my leisure ad hoc

Was no more than

Simply this writer’s block.

Fine Lines and Pebbles

   There is a fine line between on vacation, in retirement and working for oneself.  If you are retired, how do you know when you are vacation?  When does the “weekend” start?  When you work for yourself and take time for personal tasks, do you need to record “comp” time?  This is very confusing to a recently retired househusband and fledgling writer.

   Fifty years ago I listed my ambition in my high school yearbook as “To never have to work.”  My father took great exception with that statement.  He focused on the word “never” and chided me for professing a rather dilatant approach to life.  To the contrary my emphasis was on “have to.”  That was a fine line between never have to work and never have to work.  Growing up as the son of lifelong working parents, I could not imagine ever not working.  The thought of retirement was both foreign and frightening.  Work defined life as I knew it then; it still does.

  I learned early on that if I was to not have to work, I better want to work; and to do so I would need work I liked.  Now, don’t get me wrong. As a career teacher there were certainly days I fretted about if not rued the thought of the challenges before me.  At the same time I knew them as challenges, not problems.  I value highly the years I spent with kids and the opportunities I had to influence their lives.  The line between challenge and problem can be fine indeed, but I wanted those challenges.  I wanted to go to work. 

   The idea of opportunity may be what delineates challenges from problems.  I had an opportunity to make a difference in children’s lives.  Their problems became my challenges.  The opportunity to make a difference is what I consider noble about work.  Obviously, we work to support and sustain our lives, but beyond that what keeps us working? 

   I read recently that my job in life is not to “change the world” but to “help make it a better place.”  That is another fine line, and it may be simply a matter of attitude.   For years after I burned out from the savior of the world work scene, I dropped out, hid out and resisted helping anyone or anything beyond my little corner of the planet.  I re-emerged only to find a quiet place to ply my trade focusing on the here and now of my role as one teacher in one school in a small, backwater district in the middle of Phoenix.  Yet, discontentment lingered in my ego; I longed for wanting one more opportunity to throw a pebble into the pond and see how many ripples I could make.  

   “How many ripples I could make,” that was the rub.  My focus was on myself, not on how God could use me to make a difference.  The difference between being the one to toss the pebble and being the pebble is a fine line to discern.  It is a matter of attitude and a matter of purpose.

   In my chosen endeavor I am challenged by writing for profit and writing to make a difference.  I am challenged by my self-proclaimed role as social commenter.  I am challenged by sustaining a voice that offers insight from my half-century of adult experience and one that proclaims a holier-than-thou attitude.  I am challenged by writer’s block stemming from questions of “Who am I to be doing this, writing this, asking these questions, and challenging others.”  I am challenged by the fine line between being the one to toss the pebble and being the pebble. 

   Changing the world is an onerous responsibility, and it is not my place.  Helping make the world a better place seems do-able.  The very idea of “helping” means I don’t have to do this alone.  Daily as we all do, I encounter opportunities to help make the world better for someone.  I offer my thoughts only in that vein.

  I have been away from this milieu all too long; I have fretted and fumed about my station in life and the direction I should take.  My focus was on the one tossing not the pebble.  The ripples will occur; the only question regards my role in making them.  To be the one to toss the pebble is to maintain the illusion of control.  To be the pebble is to admit I am to be tossed about.  I draw the line, however fine, only by my attitude and my faith in the One doing the tossing.

   I am back.

   I had to be led back, but here I am.

   Thanks for being here with me.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. 

If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much;

apart from me you can do nothing.”  

~ John 15:5 (NIV)

(T)Axes to Grind

     The list above was taken from “545 People” by Charlie Reese, a retired reporter for the Orlando Sentinel.  The 545 includes the members of congress, the President and the Supreme Court – those to whom he attributes responsibility for enacting the list into law for the remaining 300,000,000 of us.

     Reese states that even with these taxes we are still in the red; we have a huge deficit.  That got me to thinking. “What would be our government’s natural response?”  More taxes, of course; that would get us out of the red.  More is always better. The problem then becomes what possibly is left to tax?  This is a daunting task given the laundry list of taxes already enacted, but I am sure the IRS is up to it.

     The following are proposed taxes from a White Paper circulated inside IRi$, the Internal Revenue idea Service: (Note the small “i” in IRi$; all ideas in IRi$ are small because no one takes credit for them.)

     IRi$ Proposal 10040. Sec. A: The Baby Tax.  Tax babies; the more you have the higher the tax.  Some religious groups that have high birth rates might object, but there is always someone objecting to new taxes anyway.  IRi$ has thick skin. There’s a thought; maybe we could tax people based on the thickness of their skin.  Probably not, there are too many thin-skinned people in the country.

     IRi$ Proposal 10040. Sec. B: The Baby Tax.  If we can have a graduated income tax, we can have a graduated baby tax based on numbers of babies born; we could also graduate the tax based on weight similar to vehicle taxes in some states.  We will get our friends in the medical community to prove that heavier babies come from healthier moms who are more able to support the baby so they are more able to pay increased taxes.  This might work. 

     We will appoint a committee, or better yet a task force to spend tens of millions of dollars to assess the merit of the idea.  We better use the word “feasibility” instead because the merit of the idea wouldn’t stand the scrutiny of a task force and more importantly wouldn’t cost enough to determine.  Maybe our task force could consult the Chinese; they have dealt with this baby population thing.  We certainly would need to take a junket to China for first hand observations and consultations.  That would only cost a few million, but we would get some terrific pictures of the Great Wall.

     IRi$ Proposal 10040. Sec. C: The Oxygen Tax.  Tax the air.  We will develop a scale of annual oxygen intake based on body mass.  Everyone will need to have a body mass examination conducted by government.  We don’t have enough resources to do that so we will outsource it to our friends in the insurance industry and the medical community.  An inordinate number of people in the country already are overweight and will have high body mass ratios so the tax will earn maximum dollars. 

     IRi$ Proposal 10040. Sec. C: The Oxygen Tax. Subsection O2. We can apply a penalty to people who have to use oxygen assistance equipment.  Given the number of smokers in the country that population is bound to increase geometrically returning even more dollars.  By Jove we should be out of debt in no time. 

     IRi$ Proposal 10040. Sec. D: The Tree Tax. We can apply a penalty for planting trees that increase the oxygen supply thus limiting the need for oxygen assistance equipment reducing the creation of jobs in that industry.

     IRi$ Proposal 10040. Sec. E: The Forest Industry Tax Incentive. We can apply an incentive for harvesting more trees, or better yet like the farmers’ Crop Reduction Program we can create programs for not planting trees, the SMOG incentive (Save More Oxygen Guarantee).  It will be cheaper than price supports.  Given this concept, think of what we might do for the fossil fuel industries and tobacco industry.

     We better stop at this point because we might be raking in so much money that the government would be in the black and have to begin returning tax dollars to the citizens. Silly me, that isn’t a problem.  The government would just have more to spend.

     You can finish this on your own; i am sure you have more great ideas for taxable goods and services. i need to go finish my preparing my taxes. 

          T minus 5.

The Illusion of Coincidence - Sue's Story

Our church published a devotional book written by members for the 2011 Lenten season.  An April entry is below, followed by my response to the author.

April 5, 2011

Psalm 39:7 “But now, Lord, what do I look for?  My hope is in you.” (NIV)

    The Sunday after Easter in 2006, the choir was to sing an awesome arrangement of the Gaither piece “Because He Lives” based on Psalm 39:7.  The lyrics of the chorus:

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because He lives, All fear is gone.
Because I know He holds the future,
And life is worth the living just because He lives.

    I awakened earlier than I needed that Sunday morning.  Feeling wide-awake enough that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, I grabbed a book off the nightstand I was reading.  The book, lent by a friend, was about a man who had lost his wife, one of three children, and his mother in a horrific automobile accident.  He was the driver.  I received the book because I’d experienced a tragedy of my own not long before.  I had lost my husband and my son had been living with me for a couple of months. I got home from school one day to find he’d taken his life.  Naturally, I’d been having a difficult time dealing with both losses. 

    The part of the book was about how this man had pulled back from life and had become reclusive.  I had finally gotten to the part where he was coming out of the intense fog that accompanies a tragedy, and he was writing of how he had decided he needed to move forward.  That morning I read, “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.  And life is worth the living just because He lives.”  Whoa!  Coincidence?  Definitely not!  It’s how God works.  Feeling more light-hearted than I had in months, I left for church to warm-up the choir for the anthem. 

    I don’t know what was with the choir that morning, but the warm-up wasn’t very inspiring.   I knew they needed a mini-sermon to get them to “Sing it like you mean it.”  I try not to bring personal events into choir practice, but I told them about what had happened that morning: the “God-thing” of reading the lyrics of the anthem we were doing that day, and followed it up by saying, “You all know that about eight months ago I experienced a terrible tragedy.  But I am standing before you and can attest that indeed “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. And life is worth the living just because He lives.”

    ~ Sue Jax

   Good morning Sue,

   Thank you for sharing your story in the GPC devotional.  It attests to the idea that there are no coincidences.  I have a short companion story for you.

   I was watching the beginning of the D-backs – Cubs game yesterday when it was time for me to leave to attend a writers group to which I belong.  I hesitated to leave because of the game and an attitude that the group is one of those “feel good” writers groups that does not do much to advance my skills.  My arrogance still can get the better of me.  I didn’t think I’d get much out of it, but I felt called to be there.  I dragged my tush off the couch and readied to go.  Before leaving, I retrieved a book that I wanted to share with the leader in hope that she would share it with the others. 

   Last month’s topic for the group was loss and grief; this month’s is memories of love.  The book I took was the book you described, Jerry Sittser’s A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss.

   On arrival I handed the book to the leader who did nothing with it but return it to me later.  I wasn’t disappointed because I didn’t expect anything of it since we were on to reading love stories.  Afterward, however, a young woman who I had seen just once approached me.  She and her teenage son attend together; she is working on a book to share the Word, and he is a Christian rapper.  She asked about my writing and asked if I would lend the book to her.  Of course I would; that is why I took it in the first place.  Joni shared her story, and we talked for more than an hour afterward.  You never know what God holds in our future; but it is worth the living because if we are willing, he will lead us.

   I made a new friend, one who has more to offer to me than I to her.  That we were both there was not a coincidence; God called me to be there. It was but another illusion of coincidence.

   I saw the only run the D-backs scored, and they lost the game.  I missed nothing and have the blessing of a “God-thing” new friendship.

   ~ Michael