bonar crump

bonar crump
husband - father - reader - runner - picker - grinner - lover - sinner

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

God is my fish that lives in my room

As the first day of school has come and gone a simple thought has captured my attention.

It all started with the promise to my 6 year old soon-to-be first grader that I would let her pick out a couple fish and her own fish tank to go in her room to mark the beginning of her journey in a new school, new house, new town, and new state.

The past week my daughter has taught me something about the human soul and its need for interaction.

A fish is a difficult pet for a small child. Small children do not understand the delicate nuances of contemplative visual observation. They want to touch everything. They need to put everything through a series of paces that I think of as “kid testing.” Their minds, fingers, and eyes explore every way in which a new toy, doll, or game can be exploited for weakness and creativity.

For example, give my kid a stick and it is a wand used to ward off evil dragons and, hence, it must be waved about in a creative fashion for just long enough to either poke someone in the face or knock something onto the ground. Then the princess is saved.

A board game becomes an enchanted world which unravels into a story of “bad men” and battles between rivals until the pieces are lost and the game board flung into the air resulting in someone getting poked in the face again. Then the princess is saved.

Evidently, we deal with an inordinate amount of facial contusions in our home…

There is always a narrative, action, and a general sense that everything must be touched, handled, turned every which way, and tested to the limits of the child’s dexterity.

None of this applies very well to fish…

Don’t tap the glass. Don’t put your fingers in the water. Don’t pull them out with the net. Don’t touch them. Don’t overfeed them.

You may watch them and feed them a moderate amount of food 2 or 3 times a day.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I feel so bad for getting her those fish.

She wants to interact with them. I don’t mean to imply that she doesn’t get what fish are about, but I’m worried now that I’m teaching her the skill of loving without interacting.

Matthew 18:3 says that if we do not change and become like children then we will NEVER enter the kingdom of heaven.

I’m wondering if I’ve begun to teach my little girl one of the pathways to NEVER know the kind of peace which results from living in a place where God is truly in charge.

By giving her something to love that she isn’t allowed to touch or interact with in any kind of meaningful way, am I setting the stage for her to relate to God as if in an aquarium?

Say a prayer now and again.
Routinely attend church.
Feed the offering plate.
Vote for the “right” causes.

I think I may have really screwed up on this one. How do I spin this into a positive?


What is "real" anyways?


Bombastic—
*(of speech, writing, etc.) high-sounding; high-flown; inflated.

Pretentious—
*refers specifically to language that is purposely inflated in an effort to impress.

Verbose—
*characterizes utterances or speakers that use more words than necessary to express an idea.

…all killers when attempting to write something that a wide range of people can relate to and connect with.


So, I think that what I’m beginning to learn is that brevity coupled with simple diction wrapped around profound meaning is the key to success if you want to be a writer.

Whew. I’m glad I got all that figured out. Easy enough, right?

Wait…what about that profound meaning part? How is that supposed to work? How is a writer supposed to take top shelf items down and casually place them on the bottom shelf for everyone to easily reach? For that matter, how is anyone (orator, writer, educator) expected to unpack all of the difficult terms and phrases we use in order to convey meaning which is palatable and objectively significant?

My attempt to accomplish the “shelf reorg” is via metaphor…and it drives some people crazy. I don’t realize I’m doing it most of the time. It seems as if I am so visual that even non-visual concepts such as compassion, grace, and benevolence take up residence in my head via images which later show up as metaphors. I’m pretty sure that if you took away my ability to understand the world via metaphor, simile, or implied comparison I’d be spending my days sitting in a corner wearing a diaper and drooling a lot….it’s really that bad.

My world makes perfect sense to me.

BUT….

Is this world I’ve grown accustomed to a construct of my imagination or is it real? If it’s real and I see some things that others don’t then I have something to contribute via populating the bottom shelf (see, I just did it again). If it’s all my own little construct then I’m wasting people’s time with my ideas that don’t necessarily have any value.

How does one know which is which? And if there is no way to determine one from the other then how can we every discuss absolutes, truth, and reality?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In what ways do you think that your perception of the world is unique?


I'm sick of all the dumbasses



I’ve been cursed by knowing and interacting with a lot of dumbasses.

I’m not trying to infer that I’m a “know-it-all” who looks down on those that don’t know any better. I’m talking about people that have every advantage imaginable and still respond to each and every situation with mind-numbing examples of dumbassness.

In the Christian community we like to talk about the underprivileged and unfortunate but we never think of those folks as being white-collar with multiple academic degrees and 6 figure incomes.

Have you ever been involved in a corporate board meeting? Have you ever witnessed the level of depravity and absolute dumbassness emitted by a person (or group of persons) with high academic pedigrees? Believe me…it is a vulgar site to watch men and women of affluence feed on each other, psychologically rape one another, and denigrate one another in the name of pride and position.

It’s enough to make any “common” man scream WTF.

Here’s the point to this mess…depravity, unconscionable malice, selfishness, and absolute dumbass behavior know no boundaries. As a matter of fact, “upper echelon” dumbass behavior is much more toxic because it goes unsanctioned. These folks allow one another to behave in this manner because there is an unspoken creed that says, “as long as they are one of US then we cannot let them be accountable to the THEM.”

It happens in the corporate world. It happens in the Christian church world. It happens in the suburban dilettante – Jr. League world. I simply don’t know what to do with it.

Do you have any suggestions?