Echoes in Eternity

I'm sure the mainstream media is doing all it can to avoid mentioning this story.

The leader of the nation's largest veterans organization says he is "deeply disappointed and concerned" after a meeting with President Obama today to discuss a proposal to force private insurance companies to pay for the treatment of military veterans who have suffered service-connected disabilities and injuries. The Obama administration recently revealed a plan to require private insurance carriers to reimburse the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in such cases.
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The Commander, clearly angered as he emerged from the session said, "This reimbursement plan would be inconsistent with the mandate ' to care for him who shall have borne the battle' given that the United States government sent members of the armed forces into harm's way, and not private insurance companies. I say again that The American Legion does not and will not support any plan that seeks to bill a veteran for treatment of a service connected disability at the very agency that was created to treat the unique need of America's veterans!"

Even I, who saw the evil coming this way long before Obama won in November, am amazed and shocked at how inept, incompetent, and even heartless Obama has been in his first two months. I guess I shouldn't be, since ultimately the worldview makes the man, and Obama's worldview has laid many in their graves. But still...

Here is an interesting poll on Americans and the institutions in which they put their trust (or don't). Organized religion, science (especially in medicine), the press and television, and financial institutions have all taken huge hits to their image in the last 30 years. There is a decided lack of faith in today's populace, yet more people than ever believe that mankind (the originator of those institutions) is born morally good (or at least morally neutral). What an odd paradox.

One other thing to note: when a population loses faith in the usual things, they are more willing to put their faith in something else (and usually that faith isn't focused in a good direction). Ultimately, this points back to Chesterton's words: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything." I think perhaps the same holds true in general of all faith; humanity is a race designed for faith and trust. We want and need to place our faith in something. So if the usual suspects fail us (or we perceive that they have failed), then we don't stop trusting and failing (or rarely so); rather, we look elsewhere for an outlet for our faith. For example, on the individual, micro level, if I fail my wife and permanently lose her trust, she won't stop trusting (though she may do so less willingly), she'll just put her trust somewhere else (God, herself, another man, etc.). Likewise, at the macro level, if humans lose faith that God is in control or that the world is designed to support ALL life, then they place their trust in extreme environmentalism and the fight against global warming. Or, as we are beginning to see hints of, if people lose faith in sovereign government and free markets, they'll place that faith in one leader or one monetary system.

2 Timothy 2:13

The greatest three weeks of the sports world has finally arrived! In 21 days from today, many questions will have been answered. Will we have another thrilling and amazing championship game like last year's matchup between Kansas and Memphis, where we were reminded once again that for the want of a free throw, a championship can indeed be lost? Who will be the Stephen Curry of this year's Dance (sadly, he won't have a chance of repeating his Pistol Pete-like, otherworldly performance)? Which team will come closest to replicating George Mason's incredible 2007 run? And most importantly, will my bracket still be viable after this next weekend? Can I repeat in dominating my bracket group again this season?

Does Satan ever come to you and whisper, "Is God really THAT holy?" or "Is God really THAT intolerant of sin?" or "Did He REALLY demand perfection?" or "God's not looking, a little bite won't hurt anyone." He certainly does to me. Recently, I've noticed a creeping apathy or outright negligence in my life toward certain, as Jerry Bridges might call them in a book I desperately need to read, "respectable sins" (not to mention plenty of sins which aren't "respectable"). I believe that's because I tend to see God as Satan wants me to see Him, instead of as Jesus commands me to view Him (Matt. 5:48).

I need to see God as the utterly Holy, completely Good, everlastingly Pure and Perfect King. I need to know God as first wrathful toward me as a sinner BEFORE I know Him as loving toward me as one under the cleansing of the Lamb. I need to remind myself of the God who in His divine wrath wiped out whole nations and civilizations because of sin. I need my eyelids stuck open with toothpicks until I fathom just how infinitely holy the Father is; until I can honestly cry, like Isaiah, "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips [and an even worse heart]... and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

Lord, may I see your holiness. May sin make me queasy to my stomach. May even the temptation of a lustful thought or a prideful attitude make me feel like spiritually puking before You! And when I do fail to honor your holiness, may I immediately repent and cling evermore tightly to the Cross, knowing confidently that though I am a great sinner, Christ is an even greater Savior!

In light of Obama's decision last week to overturn the "Conscience Rule," it's particularly interesting to read about a similar situation in Britain (only, in this case, it's regarding life on the opposite end of the spectrum).

I found this to be particularly challenging. I'm convicted this morning that many times I don't fight temptation or repent of sin like I should, like this man does.

Yesterday, I was talking to a few people in my office, and one of the women mentioned that she has a belly button ring; then she pulled up her shirt to show it to everyone present. Not good. I could feel my desires immediately pull me.

I went back to my desk and repented. I repented and pleaded with God for help again this morning during my QT, and then some more on my way into work. Once I got to work, I sat in the car for an additional 15 minutes fighting it.

I thought about what would happen if my lustful thoughts played themselves out to the extreme, in terms of the consequences that would follow... It made me sick to my stomach.

Then I thought about the joy I have in a loving relationship with my wife, and how excited I am to praise God in sharing with others whenever things are going well.
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I meditated on Jesus on the cross crying out to his father, asking why he has forsaken him. Answer: My adulterous heart.
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I hate sin. I hate my fallen nature. I hate Satan.

I love the Gospel. I love the the thought of heaven. I love Jesus.

Please pray that I would continue to battle.

Amen for us all!

"I hope to have an affect on readers by effecting their grammar."

Hopefully, by the end of this post, you will understand the errors in that sentence.

Affect and effect are two of the trickiest words in the English language; partly because of their similar-sounding pronunciation, and partly due to the fact that they each mean more than one thing. Aff-ECT means "have an influence on," OR it means to put on an unnatural air (like a fake accent). AFF-ect, on the other hand, is used to refer to the emotions exhibited by people ("her affect was melancholy"). So a singer could affect the audience by including a bluesy affect to her vocals.

If you're not confused yet, we still have to deal with effect, which has two meanings and is routinely misspelled or confused with affect. The more common use of the word effect is as a noun ("This brown bean dish could have an effect on me later"), but it can also be used as a verb meaning "to create" ("I would like to effect a change in my eating habits"). Obviously, it can be quite confusing discerning between affect and effect. A general rule of thumb is to use effect when it's a noun (except in reference to emotion) and affect when it's a verb (except when it means "to create").

Thus, if we return to the opening phrase of this post, you will notice that I have switched the two terms and used them both incorrectly.

All of the following sentences are correct:

"I would enjoy effecting a change to your daily routine."
"I would enjoy affecting your daily routine."
"I would enjoy having an effect on your daily routine."

Dr. Dalrymple has an excellent column this week in the New English Review on the thrill of reading (and writing) about evil in comparison to doing likewise about good. As he points out, "a newspaper that reported only acts of kindness and generosity would be insufferably boring and would go bankrupt." People want to hear and read about bad people and evil deeds.

To write of good people is often to sound either naïve or priggish; whereas to write of the bad is to appear worldly and sophisticated. One of the reasons, of course, for the difficulty of writing interestingly of the good is that there seems so much less to say of them than of the bad. The good act according to principle, and are therefore lamentably (from the literary point of view) predictable. Once you know how they behave in one situation, you know how they will behave in others. The bad, by contrast, have no principles beyond the pursuit of short-term self-interest, and sometimes not even that. They are therefore not predictable and their conduct is infinitely various.
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At the same time, of course, there is the problem of evil: how it arises, and how it triumphs. No one troubles himself to anything like the same extent over the problem of good: how it arises, or how it triumphs. Perhaps this is testimony to the victory of Rousseau’s idea that we are fundamentally good by nature, though deformed by society, over that of Original Sin, which proposes that we are all sinful from birth.
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It occurred to me in view of the problem of good – I mean the literary problem, not the metaphysical one – to try to write interestingly of some of the very good people whom it has been my fortune to encounter in my passage through this vale of tears we call the world.
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I think... of the adolescent son of a female alcoholic patient, nasty and violent in drink, whom I expected to be adversely affected by growing up in an atmosphere of every conceivable kind of squalor, physical, emotional and moral. If he had been truculent and aggressive I should have understood it; if he had thought he was hard done by, I could hardly have disagreed with him. But instead of being such a young man, he was extremely well-mannered and attentive to his own education, not resentful in the least; moreover, he looked after his disagreeable mother with a tenderness that was amazing to behold and (frankly) impossible to understand, considering the dog’s life she had led him. Where did such goodness come from? It was at least as difficult a problem as that of evil.
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I met in an obscure part of Nigeria an aged Irish nun, well into her seventies, living in an isolated convent with other nuns, who made it her work to bring food to the prisoners in the local prison. I have very little doubt that they would have been severely malnourished or even starved to death without her arduous attentions; she made sure that each of the prisoners, some of whose sentences had expired but who had not the requisite money to bribe the gaolers to release them, and others of whom had been on remand for ten years, was fed. For it was a matter of fact, accepted as a law of nature, that officialdom would steal whatever there was to be stolen.

The nun had nothing but her moral authority to effect her work, and she had no reward but the gratitude of the prisoners and the compliance of the guards. It was clear that they all now had both a respect and an affection for her; she carried around with her an aura of invulnerability to the world’s evil. But none of this had gone to her head, on the contrary; her humility was genuine and unselfconscious, and I suppose if asked she would have denied any special merit in her conduct. The reproach to one’s own comparative lack of humanity was implicit rather than explicit. The power of example is that it is exemplary, not declarative, much less declamatory.

It is not of course for me to say whether I have been able to interest the reader in some of the remarkably good people whom I have met, or whether they would really rather have heard about the baby-sitter whom I met who killed the three infants in his charge because he didn’t like the noise they were making that interfered with his concentration on television. It might be said that, having described the goodness of these five people, I would have nothing more of interest to say about them; whereas, had I chosen the four or five greatest moral monsters whom I had encountered, I would have much more to say.

But this is not quite right; the fact is that we are much more interested in the life histories of the moral monsters than in those of people like the five exemplars whom I have described. Their lives were neither uniform nor without interest, but I did not enquire into them with the same curiosity that I have employed in the cases of the moral monsters.

In summary, it may be said that evil attracts and engrosses us in a way that good rarely does.

My wife and I caught a matinee yesterday afternoon, and she was gracious enough to let me pick the movie (in other words, no chick flicks). I'd been wanting to see Clint Eastwood's latest (and perhaps last) directorial and acting work, Gran Torino. So that's what we saw. It is AMAZING! I won't ruin any of the plot twists, but suffice it to say that Eastwood should have won a Best Actor AND Best Director Oscar for this story about a man coming to terms with past sins, overcoming racist disdain in a MEANINGFUL way (his salty words don't change, but the meaning behind them does drastically), and sacrificially loving one's neighbors. Large parts of the movie are vintage Eastwood, harkening back to his Josey Wales or Dirty Harry days. I only wish that there was even more of a reliance on faith in God than portrayed in the movie.


[Be aware that there is some violence and a SIGNIFICANT amount of harsh or obscene language.]

Obama intends to overturn Bush's "Conscience Rule." I suppose there are still a few people who claim that he's pro-choice, not pro-abortion. But it would seem that their numbers must be dwindling...

I thought it might be fun (at least, for a nerd like me) to start a Grammar Fundamentals Friday. For awhile, I have had a link on this blog to the left to a site which discusses almost all grammatical questions one might have. This "series" will take that one step further and actually highlight some of the more popular errors in the English language each week. If you have any suggested topics, feel free to share.

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"I can think of a myriad of reasons to do that."

One usually finds myriad in the above form, prefaced by a and followed by of. And due to the times in which we live with a significant lowering of standards in the English language, this is considered by some to be valid. However, if one looks at the original meaning of the word ("countless" or "ten thousand"), it becomes apparent that the proper use of the word is as one would use the word many. In other words, the above sentence should read "I can think of myriad reasons to do that." Unfortunately, I come across this correct use of the term infrequently at best, usually in more classical writers.

Thus ends the first lesson of How to Read and Write Good. I hope to do myriad more of these, hopefully on a weekly basis.

Gross.

This is sweet!