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Generosity Versus Skepticism

November 21, 2011 in Life, Spirituality with 13 Comments

A few weeks back I had an encounter with a stranger that has replayed in my mind numerous times since then. It was a Monday morning and I was walking from the parking lot to Liberty Market for a meeting with the worship team. A guy stopped me and asked me if I would help him get an inhaler for his brother. I hesitated, like I normally do when suddenly hit up for something odd, but then concluded that this was something I needed to do.

He asked me if I would drive him to a nearby parking lot where he could meet his girlfriend (who had his little brother with her). I took him to it and then he asked me for $13 to buy the inhaler. I only had a $20, but he had seven ones to make change. He then asked if he could use my phone to see where she was. After he called her, he said that she was apparently at a different intersection and asked if I could drive there. While he pitched it as “just up the street,” it ended up being a 10-15 minute drive farther. I asked him a bunch of questions during our drive and he had very specific answers for all of them.

I had the nagging feeling that I was getting scammed.

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Do You Like Mystery?

November 2, 2011 in Life, Spirituality with 4 Comments

“The ideal mystery is one you would read if the end was missing.” Raymond Chandler

I recently read that quote and it got my mind thinking. Is it true? Can you have a good mystery with no reveal at the end? J.J. Abrams addressed this in his TED talk and in his iconic show Lost.

I don’t think that all people have the same appetite for mystery. Some people have an appetite for certainty, and will only entertain mystery on its way to providing us with a certain ending. As I reflect on this, I think I’m one of the people who would agree with Chandler’s idea above.

I recently read about a document known as the Voynich manuscript. It is described this way:

It is a handwritten book of 246 pages containing numerous illustrations and approximately 170,000 characters. What is special about it? The script employed is utterly unknown and therefore illegible. According to a radiocarbon analysis conducted in 2009 by the University of Arizona, the manuscript was created in the first half of the fifteenth century (probably between 1404 and 1438).

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Happiness For a Lifetime

September 5, 2011 in Life with 5 Comments

Source: bakadesuyo.com

Where is Your Place?

August 27, 2011 in Life with 5 Comments

I’m sitting in Hawaii at the moment, and the picture above was my view yesterday evening. We had to wake up at 5am to catch our flight (which was 2am Hawaii time) and that was the third day in a row I had to get up at that hour. While that may be normal for some of you reading this, this is brutal for a night owl like myself.

As I stared at the view above I could literally feel my stress and anxiety flow away. I could sense myself returning back to the guy who can be contemplative and creative. But it often takes a place like this.

Now it isn’t realistic to rely on a gorgeous place like Hawaii to find this sort of balance. That’s why my normal place is on my back patio with our waterfall in the pool running beside me. That is where I normally choose to read and write and reflect.

Where is your place? Where is that place that you have regularly (or occasionally only) where you go to unwind and get back to those things that make you tick? If you feel the stress and busyness of life starting to add up, it may be time to find some silence in your place.

The Scarcity of Silence

August 24, 2011 in Life with 5 Comments

I read an interesting take on the value of silence in a book a few months back and I have been continuing to process it since then. Alan Jacobs wrote about an idea that I had never thought much about before:

“Solitude may be more accessible for modern Westerners than for anyone else in history, but it would be perverse to say that we have too much of it.”

I’ve never stopped to reflect much on the first point of this sentence, but as soon as I thought back to my experiences in traveling I immediately agreed with it. The last country I traveled to was Egypt and I remember telling my wife how quiet it was when I got home. Between the noise of the city and the continual calls to prayer (even through the night), you get used to constant noise.

What we easily forget is the luxury of available silence in our lives.

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