A Phrase I Don't Understand

I've been noticing a phrase lately in different contexts that I fundamentally don't understand the use of.

"In it to win it..."

Has anyone, ever, for any reason be "in" something for any reason other than to win it? Okay, so I'm sure you can give me a few examples of that happening. But the people using this stupid phrase do so during their participation whatever contest they're in. So the real question is whether anyone has ever admitted during the contest that they're in it for any reason other than to win it? I'm going with no.

So please all of you political candidates (and Hillary is the one I specifically heard say this at one point, though I'm sure others on both sides of the aisle have said it), save your breath. We'll assume that you are running in hopes of winning and won't pull the plug on it until we'll all already written you off and stopped caring anyway. And besides, when you bail later you're kind of going back on your word - and you can bet someone is going to bring that up the next time you run for public office.

If all of your friends jumped off of a...

You can all hear your parents saying it, "If all of your friends jumped off of a bridge would you do that too?" Sometimes we here at CIY like to test out theories like that. So for your viewing pleasure, enjoy the evidence of our stupidity.

Video

Thankfully none of the guys involved in this video were hurt and none of them knew that I'd said earlier that I'd be willing to jump off the higher part of the roof. After doing it from the lower level, I might want to take some falling lessons before attempting the higher - plus I did qualify my offer by saying that if the crash mat were large enough I would do it. This mat isn't as large as I had in mind.

From the Weekend

I finally broke down this weekend and created a Facebook account. I didn't see it coming until a co-worker gently informed me that having our incoming interns participate in a book discussion using a Yahoo group was very old school and I should instead do it on Facebook. I fought it for a while, but finally decided I was simply being stubborn. So now I have a Facebook account - though not a very complete one.

One other highlight from this weekend was something that happened yesterday. A good friend taught me several years ago that worship doesn't just happen on Sunday morning at 10am or at a large event. Worship can happen almost anywhere when our hearts and minds are focused on God and we are giving glory to Him. This was a real eye-opener for me, because it gave me a different perspective on many of the things I enjoy doing.

Case in point. Yesterday afternoon I had the chance to pull the Civic in the garage and perform a routine oil change & tire rotation. Now this isn't the sort of thing that everyone likes to do, but I do. I wouldn't want to do it all the time, but it's fun once in a while to work with my hands (other than for typing). So there I was on a cold January day with the Civic up in the air changing the oil, checking the fluid levels and rotating the tires (the fronts were showing more wear than I'd like, that might indicate something about my driving!). I'm always uneasy about coming right out and calling an experience like this "worship", but I can say it was some time away from the TV, the computer, and the cell phone (for the most part) when I could enjoy something simple. At the very least I'm very thankful to have opportunities like that.

Finally, our house was shown once this weekend. We are trying very hard to fight our anxious feelings about whether it will sell or not and trust that God will bring a buyer in His timing - if it is His will for us to buy the house we are hoping to buy. The other "hands on" project I did this weekend was installing a new door bell button. A quick trip to Lowe's and $5 later and now we have a new button that looks nice (because the center isn't broken) and lights up. How's that for adding curb appeal?!?

Stewardship

Last night our small group met and I did the unthinkable, I talked to college students about stewardship. If that's not a recipe for disaster I don't know what is.

Actually, we spent most of our time talking about aspects of stewardship other than giving and financial related matters.

One of the first things we talked about was what stewardship is and/or what a steward is. For our context we came down to the concept that a steward is someone who oversees or manages something that doesn't belong to him or her. We had to talk a little bit before people were able to apply that to things like time - we tend to think of our time as "our time".

We looked at the Parable of the Talents from Matthew 25:14-30. My thought process was that there are some concepts we can get from that parable other than related to what we do with resources.

One thing I didn't know, but learned from the notes in my NIV Study Bible was that our use of the word "talent" - referring to ability - is derived from this story that Jesus told. I almost feel the need to put a disclaimer on that statement, but that's what the notes said, I'm not sure how that happened or why we know that.

Clearly the story Jesus is telling is about more than how to double your investment. The first two servants took what they were given - the equivalent of many years worth of wages - and did something with it. The point I tried to make with the group was simply that God expects us to use the things He gives us, not hide them.

We talked about reasons we might be tempted not to make use of an ability or an opportunity that God gives us - fear being a number one motivator.

We also talked about the master's statement to the first two servants - that they had been faithful over a few things and he would put them over many things. I posed a question to the group:

- Does this mean if we're faithful with the things God gives us, we're guaranteed to be blessed with more (this probably deals with financial matters mostly in our minds)?

That's a bit of a sticky question and not one we really wrestled to the ground, certainly there have been people who were faithful financially and still struggled or did not receive enormous material blessings. I believe the principle Jesus was teaching that faithfulness in small things leads to greater opportunity is true, but our perspective of what that looks like is often skewed. We're looking for our bank account to swell when we faithfully tithe for a year or a huge promotion when we are diligent and faithful in our current position. Sometimes it works that way, but as with many things in life, the blessings God gives us aren't always so visible and obvious and many times they come in forms we're not expecting.

We also talked about stewardship of time and relationships. My wife gave me the strangest look when I started asking the group to give me areas of life that required stewardship other than personal finance, but after a minute or so she was the one that eventually came up with both time and relationships as stewardship issues.

The crux of what I was hoping to communicate was that we need to see things from the perspective that God has put things in our care - everything from abilities to opportunities to time to relationships to money - and our job is to manage, oversee, use, steward, make the most of (pick your verb here, but be careful with what you pick regarding relationships, you don't want to suggest to a woman that you're planning to use or manage your relationship with her) those things.

Next week I'm hoping to stay on the general topic of stewardship and deal more specifically with financial matters. I haven't figure out how I'm going to project an Excel document on my living room wall just yet, but I'm working on it (kidding).

One note from the parable we studied. The first two servants doubled the money they were given in an undisclosed amount of time. The story says the master was gone a long time, but doesn't really indicate how long. I am guessing (purely speculation) it was a couple of years. In the stock market today, if you can double your money every 7 years you're doing fairly well. If I'm right about these two doubling the master's money in 2 years they had exceedingly high returns on their investments. This is part of why I think the story was less about money and more about making use of what God has given you in a broader sense. There are other places in scripture where we read about people experiencing exponential returns on their efforts, but rarely about high multiple financial investments.

SIT DOWN! NO! YOU STAND UP!

Friday night, Brittany I drove out to Carthage to watch Webb City play basketball. We had heard that the Carthage HS gym didn't have a lot of seating, hence it would be important for us to get there early. So we ate dinner and rolled out, got there right at 6pm. We were able to grab a couple of seats right behind the WC bench (then again, with only 8 rows per side, if you were on the bench side of the court you were pretty much guaranteed to be right behind a bench) near her grandparents.

The girls game was a good one, went back and forth, but Carthage eventually won - size and experience beat youth and speed this time (keep in mind WC is playing 6 or 7 freshmen and 1 junior, not kidding). This is a match up I'd like to see repeated later in the season as I think the WC girls learned somethings that might change the outcome later. But Carthage simply had too much on this night.

The guys game was also a good one, which WC controlled throughout before Carthage made a late run to get the once 20+ point lead down to just 7 before WC eventually closed it out as a 9-point win. Carthage is about 1 solid threat on both ends away from being really dangerous and in the rematch if WC doesn't shoot the ball well it could be a totally different game.

That's all well and good, but here's the point of this blog. In a completely overcrowded gym an older gentleman decided to sit right behind 5 rows of WC high school students. This guy was apparently a WC fan, but none-the-less within 2 minutes of the boys game starting he was screaming at the students to sit down so that he could see. Are you kidding? Everyone pretty much ignored him until he went and got a WC administrator to come and make the students sit.

While this had no actual effect on me, I was across the aisle from it all, I was completely offended by the whole thing. Whether you agree with the establishment of a "student section" at games (and clearly he didn't) or not, you can't sit behind what clearly is the area they've chosen to congregate, come in after they've already been there for a whole game (he showed up between games) and then expect them to sit down. Advice for the old guy: Stay home. The game is on the radio. Option 2, find somewhere, anywhere else to sit.

I found it really unfortunate that the WC administrator did make the students sit over the complaint of one guy who had forced his way into that section between games. I certainly respect a school system who will keep their students under control during games - not allowing them to say inappropriate things, hold inappropriate signs, etc. - but what is the point of going to the game if you have to behave like you're still in 3rd period English? No, really, someone explain that to me. I don't think this incident is likely to have any bearing on the enthusiasm of the students, but a regular policy of squelching any display of excitement or passion is a great way to create apathetic fans and students - and let's be honest, that's not good for anyone.

I am thankful I wasn't actually in the middle of the whole thing. I fear I might not have represented Christ very well, because I'd have been likely to tell the older gentleman he needed to find a new seat or get up off his butt. And I might not have been too cooperative when it came to a request for me to sit down during a game I paid to get into. I find that there is a feisty side in me that wants out in situations like that. Everyone seems better off when I can just avoid them.

One other note from Friday night. As the boys game was ending, the Carthage student section - who was allowed to stand throughout the games - started chanting, "Let's play football..." Nicely done. To which the WC students (many of them guys on the football team) responded by holding up one fist and prominently displaying a particular finger. No, not the middle one, the one next to it with the State Championship ring from 2006 on it. But you can't blame the Carthage guys for wanting to get some mileage out of that win, my word the guys who beat WC the previous time (back in the 80s) have sons on this team. This current group knows it might be their children who next get the chance to talk smack to WC about football, so they'd better get their licks in now.

You 'ens, That Ain't Proper Grammar

In my last post I mentioned people butchering the English language. I'm probably not one to talk a lot about that. I come from a small town in Northeast Oklahoma and at times my English isn't great. I certainly have been known to drop the occasional "ain't" into a sentence or find some other way to create a drawl effect on a word that didn't need it.

I do have a couple of pet-peeves when it comes to phrases I hear people use incorrectly. Here are a few examples (and please bear in mind I'm not an English scholar, so I can't use the correct terms to explain why these things are wrong, but can tell you that they are):

- "Senior year" - Immediate question when someone says that is "whose"? My problem with people dropping those two words in a sentence is that it assumes that their senior year is the only one that ever existed. While I'm pretty sure it's grammatically incorrect, it mostly bugs me because it comes across as being fairly self-absorbed. Just to be ornery I have considered interrupting people when they do it by simply asking, "Whose?" just to throw them off.

- "Say sorry" - This is what a parent might say to their child when trying to get them to apologize to someone. The problem here is that it doesn't designate for the child who is sorry. Correctly stated it would be, "Say you're sorry" or "Tell them that you are sorry". That word doesn't really mean much unless you can manage to actually take some ownership of the sorriness, otherwise it comes off as about as heartfelt as it sounds when an angry teen says it and you know he or she doesn't mean it at all.

- "Tell them a Merry Christmas" - Again, parents trying to get their child to do something good, but treating the words Merry Christmas as though they need no verb to make sense. You've got to say "Tell them to have a Merry Christmas".

- "and etc." - This one can happen verbally and in print. If you're running through a list of items and decide to drop the "etc." you don't need the "and". The use of the etc. kind of assumes that there's at least one more in the list. So if you're writing it, you just hit the comma after the last named item in the list and then go straight to "etc." and leave it at that. If you're speaking, just don't say "and" ahead of etc. (which I can't spell and Blogger doesn't recognize)

I'll quit - both because I can't think of any other good examples right now and because this post really isn't going anywhere.

Yellow Flags

College Bowl season is a great time of year, particularly when you get lucky on a bunch of your picks and are in line to win the office pick 'em contest.

Occasionally I find myself contemplating buying a couple of the yellow flags that football officials use to signal penalties during the game to carry around with me. Think about all the uses you could have for these.

Someone cuts you off in traffic, pelt them with the flag. "Offsides, on the brilliant driver of the blue car, 3 honks and an angry wave will be assessed from the spot of the foul for the next 2 miles."

Someone takes 46 items to the express checkout, in comes the flag. "Illegal formation, on the self-absorbed guy. Twelve angry stares and three muffled comments while he checks out followed by openly derogatory comments once he is gone."

Someone exhibits a complete inability to use the English language (and I'm talking about native English speakers here), flag on the play. "Personal foul, roughing the language. Six months of grammar school, do not repeat that sentence."

I'm just thinking this could be a fun way to point out everyone else's flaws and mistakes.

Thankfully life doesn't really work like that and more importantly God doesn't treat us that way. Rather than publicly humiliate us for the mistakes we've made, He sent His Son to die on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. The Bible tells us that rather than throw the penalty flag every time we fail He forgives us if we ask Him to and our faith is in Jesus. Even better, once He forgives it is forgotten. If only I could learn to be that gracious to others. Maybe I'll put my yellow flag idea back on the shelf for now.