Hello!

Did you know that today is World Hello Day? I didn’t either, until I found the link at wikipedia. It’s a rather obscure holiday (at least I consider something obscure that has been around since I was ten years old and I never heard about it), the purpose of which is to use communication to help bring about world peace.

People around the world use the occasion of World Hello Day as an opportunity to express their concern for world peace. Beginning with a simple greeting on World Hello Day, their activities send a message to leaders, encouraging them to use communication rather than force to settle conflicts.

I think saying hello to ten people is a good thing, but as most people can easily say hello to ten people within their own community in the course of their daily routine, I have trouble seeing how it sends a message to leaders or to people elsewhere in the world who might not be at peace with us. I’m not sure how many people I said hello to today – not knowing that it was a special day for saying hello – but even if it was ten, how would that make a difference outside my community?

Let’s see, there was Jane at the Girl Scout Stocking Stuffer event (we donated toys and school supplies to be put in stockings for needy children in the community). And another Girl Scout leader whom I don’t know, but who was very friendly to us. There was Jackie at Wal-Mart, who pretended to bump her shopping cart into mine by mistake.

I would have said hello to the teenage girl who answered the door when we went to deliver popcorn (from the Cub Scout fundraiser) if she hadn’t forestalled my greeting by saying, “No thanks, we don’t want any.” (I explained that her mom had already bought it, and we were just delivering it, at which point she was much more friendly, and accepted the popcorn from us.)

And of course I said greeted the other members of my family, when we got up this morning (or this evening, in the case of my husband with his night work schedule). I think a cheerful and friendly hello is a great thing, and it’s good for both the greeter and “greetee,” and does lead to a greater sense of community and mental and emotional health. But unless we say hello to people outside our community, how does it help the cause of world peace?

Well, here on my blog I get to say hello to as many people as visit. Based on recent stats (helped greatly by my having been a finalist for the Fun with WordPress Logo contest), considerably more than ten people have been visiting here daily. I don’t know how many read my current post, as opposed to the one I did for the contest, but I’ll assume that some at least will read this.

Most will be English-speakers, since I’m writing in English. But I’ll say hello in a few other languages anyway, just in case.

Hello!

¡Hola!

Salut!

Hallo!

Aloha!

Saluton!

Alô!

And if you speak a different language, or would like to be able to say hello in another language, you can find out how to say hello in a lot of different languages here.

Music: Monroe Crossing

It’s 11 PM, and normallly I would be heading to bed now (if I weren’t already asleep), but I’m still pumped up from tonight’s concert. Listening to Monroe Crossing was fabulous. I enjoyed our own part of the concert too, singing the spirituals, and later singing the Bluegrass Mass accompanied by Monroe Crossing. But I couldn’t help thinking, sitting in the audience while the band performed, that all the chorale rehearsals were worth it to get to hear Monroe Crossing without having to pay for a ticket.

I don’t know whether I’m a fan of bluegrass in general now, but I’m certainly a fan of Monroe Crossing. (I even went to facebook to become a fan of them there.) They are funny, friendly, and superb musicians. Amazingly versatile, in terms of the instruments played and the styles of music they can do. Bluegrass is a meld of styles to begin with, and apparently it has branched off into a number of sub-genres. They could probably do all of them if they chose to.

One of the really fun numbers Monroe Crossing did was what they said was a cross between bluegrass and Motown – what they call “mo-grass” (say it aloud if you don’t get the humor there). As ignorant of much of pop culture as I am, even I recognized “My Girl,” even if I had no idea (until I looked it up on wikipedia) that it was a hit from The Temptations. I don’t know what The Temptations would have thought of their song being play bluegrass style, but the audience tonight sure enjoyed it.

There were Gospel numbers, including two written by members of Monroe Crossing. I liked “Into the Fire” so much that I bought the CD afterward. They did numbers that were pure bluegrass, including one written by the “founding father” of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe (for whom this band is named). Because of the upcoming holidays, the banjo player even performed a solo version of “Carol of the Bells” – on the banjo, of course.

If you get a chance to hear Monroe Crossing, take advantage of the opportunity. Even if you don’t think you’d like bluegrass, let them surprise you. As quoted in our concert programs tonight, “I dare ANYONE to watch Monroe Crossing and not get happy!” (D.A. Calloway, Silver Dollar City)

When fingers do the reading

Monday evening, our Webelos den went to the library to work on earning their Communicator pin. After going over how to find books and how to take good care of them, the children’s librarian brought out what looked like a very large photo album. This was a Braille copy of the Bible, she explained, and she gave the boys a chance to feel the pages.

My parents had friends who were blind, so I was familiar with the look and feel of Braille materials from an early age. (Not that I ever learned to read them.) It came as somewhat of a surprise, Monday, to realize that it has been so long since I have seen someone actually using Braille that it was probably something completely new to these fourth grade boys.

The librarian added that no one was using the Braille books anymore, so they had been removed from the library’s holdings. She saved the Braille Bible herself, because it seemed a shame to lose something so wonderful. Today people use recorded books instead, she explained.

When I was growing up, there were recorded books, but they weren’t widely available. When my grandfather had cataract surgery, he had patches over his eyes while he recovered, and we took turns staying with him and helping him out while he was unable to see. To pass the time, he listened to some recorded books, which were loaned out by the organization that made them available to blind people.

For the challenge of it

In a recent post I quoted mountaineer George Mallory’s famous line about why he climbed mountains: “Because it’s there.” The challenge drew him irresistibly, even to his death atop Mount Everest. While I like hiking, I’ve never been drawn to dangerous climbs. But I do respond to the challenge of a good puzzle.

My sons, especially my younger son Al, do not seem to feel the same way about challenges. I am annoyed when he helps me with a puzzle I’m working on, though I try to express appreciation because I know he means to be helpful. I do not want help, I want to solve it on my own. Some of that may be pride, but it is also because it is the challenge itself that appeals to me, and to the extent that hints reduce the difficulty of solving it, they reduce my pleasure in finding the solution.

Over the years I’ve noticed that some kinds of challenges appeal to me more than others. At one time, the idea of fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzles appealed to me. One sort has no picture, just a solid color, and only the shape of the pieces shows how to put it together. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle, where every piece is exactly the same shape, and only the picture provides the solution - plus the puzzle is double-sided, with the same picture on both sides! But by the time I had money of my own to purchase such puzzles, I found I was no longer interested.

I enjoy difficult crossword puzzles, but if I spend an hour on a puzzle and have only come up with a few words, not enough to help me get any more, the puzzle is simply too hard for me. I will try even longer on an acrostic, but eventually I will give up on those also if too many clues are too obscure for me to come up with even a decent guess. I can do “cross-sums” puzzles, but I find that too often, I discover three quarters of the way through that I must have made some error in logic early on, and the only way to undo it is to start completely over. So I rarely start them at all.

One kind of puzzle I enjoy is computer programming, but never purely for the sake of the challenge itself. I like doing programming that provides a useful solution to a problem, or an entertaining game to play. I work at the application level, meaning the level where the program interacts with the user, rather than at the systems level where the program simply provides a platform for other developers to write their programs.

One kind of computer puzzle I have never found an interest in is hacking. The term hacker is often used in a pejorative sense, because some hackers have used their ability to alter hijack code for malicious purposes. But at root, hacking is simply figuring out the secrets that are coded into computers and not intended for anyone but the people who put them there to know. It’s not a challenge that appeals to me, but it has a very strong appeal to many people – at least to many young men (estimates of hacker demographics indicate that about 90% are male and median age is 25).

Movies: Song of the South

My husband has been telling me about this movie since we first started collecting Disney movies to play on our VCR. (We buy DVDs these days, but rarely get Disney movies anymore.) He had seen Song of the South on TV on “The Wonderful World of Disney”; I hadn’t even heard of it. (There were many movies I had never heard of – he says I was culturally deprived.)

As each classic Disney movie came out on video, we waited for Song of the South to hit the shelves. But it never happened; finally we realized it just wasn’t going to be released. There are all kinds of rumors about why it isn’t going to be released – or alternatively, that it is going to be released (always next year or the year after). The reasons for not releasing it have to do with the racial stereotypes it portrays, and apparently it has been controversial in this regard since its initial box office release.

My husband decries this sort of political correctness, pointing out that the black people in the movie are portrayed very positively. I’ve read similar opinions on websites regarding the movie. I also read one comment, from an “Anonymous African-American” who guesses that all such comments were written by white people, who have no idea why the racial stereotypes in the movie are so offensive. Unfortunately, this person doesn’t try to explain why they are.

Finally, today, I got to watch the movie. My husband has been downloading lots of TV shows and movies from the internet, and burning them to DVD. Apparently Disney had no problem releasing Song of the South in other countries, where the racial history of our own country does not provoke such controversy. These have been turned into bootleg versions of the movie, and Disney has (at least according to wikipedia) chosen not to take any legal action.

As this seems to be the only way to see the movie, and Disney evidently is more concerned about not officially releasing the movie than preventing it from being distributed, I was happy enough to sit down with my sons to finally watch it (my husband had to sleep before going to work for the night). My younger son was bored through the initial live-action sequences, but started enjoying it once some animation appeared.

No new names

You may (or may not) have noticed that I have added no new posts lately using the alphabet to come up with names for God. The letter N turned out to be my nemesis in that regard. I knew there would be letters that just wouldn’t work, but I didn’t expect N to be one of them.

Of course, I might have remembered that when we play word games (during long car trips, for instance), we often get stuck on the letter N. If the category is animals, we come up with newt and nuthatch, but after that we get stuck. For food, there are nuts and noodles, and neapolitan ice cream and nonpareils if you count desserts, but not much more. Place names, at least, are easier – there are lots of places starting with “New” or “North.”

There are some interesting words starting with the letter N. Do you know what nosology is? No, it’s not the study of the nose, it’s the study of diseases. (Nasology is the study of the nose.) And nostology is the study of senility. Nephology is the study of clouds. Nebulaphobia is the fear of fog, and nyctophobia is the fear of the night or darkness.

But I noticed no names for God in that list. There is the word numinous: of, like or pertaining to a deity; suffused with religious awe. But usually it is used of religious experiences, not of God Himself. I suppose I could use noble, or never-ending. But I still don’t have a noun to go with one of those adjectives.

My first thought was nonpareil. As a candy, it is “a small, flat chocolate drop covered with white pellets of sugar” – and my husband’s favorite snack at movies, especially if made of with dark chocolate rather than milk chocolate. But its basic meaning is “thing of unequalled excellence; paragon” (apparently whoever named it thinks its the best candy around).

Certainly God is of unequalled excellence. But the very meaning of the word made it hard to match an adjective to it. To qualify the word with an adjective would suggest that there are other kinds of nonpareils, and God is one particular kind of nonpareil. Which of course goes against the idea of the word, that He is unequalled.

I finally decided that, having gotten halfway through the alphabet, I would take a break. At some point I’ll come back to it. But not now.

Give Water for Christmas

I’m going to start my Christmas shopping tomorrow. I don’t know yet what I’ll get my family, but I want to give someone in Africa some water. Ten years’ worth of water – clean water that will give life instead of disease and death.

There are a lot of charities competing for donations, all the more so these days with the rough economy, and some people who used to be donors now having to be on the receiving side instead. I try to pick one or two organizations to give to, ones that I’m sure are doing good work with the money entrusted to them. In the past I’ve given mostly to Heifer International, and I still think they’re doing great work.

But I recently learned about Water for Christmas. I happen to know the woman who started it, because we go to the same church. As a matter of fact she’s married to one of the pastors, and I’ve taught three of her sons in the K/1 class (not all at the same time - there’s a year or two between each one). So when the website says that 100% of the money I give goes directly to providing clean water in Africa, I believe it.

You can read her story here, and find out why she and her husband are so passionate about helping children in Africa. And if you’d like to get started with your Christmas shopping tomorrow, join in First Gift, a one day “viral campaign” to get as many people as we can to give $10 tomorrow, enough to give one person ten years’ worth of clean, life-giving water.

Puzzles: Cube Eraser

When my younger son told me that the prize for selling at least one item in his school’s fundraiser was a Rubik’s Cube eraser, I wasn’t too excited. I’m not excited by school fundraisers to begin with, though I do take the brochures to work and leave them in the breakroom for my co-workers to browse through. (Throughout the fall months, there is a steady succession of fundraiser brochures for different schools and community groups, often including multiples of the same fundraiser because our department has a lot of parents of school-age kids.)

My son gets a lot of erasers in goodie bags at holidays, and I couldn’t see much reason to be excited about another one. They are bright and colorful and sometimes cute, in every imaginable shape and theme: Christmas trees, smileys, rainbows, basketballs… just take a look at an Oriental Trading catalog to find dozens more. But I’d never seen a Rubik’s Cube eraser. I wondered if it was supposed to go on the end of a pencil or not.

When the fundraiser items arrived today, I found a colorful rubber cube, but it didn’t look a bit like a Rubik’s Cube. And the packing list just called it a “Cube Eraser.” But he was thrilled with it, and promptly asked me to unwrap it so he could take it apart. Take it apart? How do you take an eraser apart? I thought it was just going to look like a puzzle, not actually be one.

God’s Mighty Majesty

Yesterday the daily Bible reading I receive by email began with Psalm 93. “The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed; he has put on strength as his belt.” A few lines later I read “Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty!” That wasn’t the passage I had planned to use with Mighty Majesty (my notes had Psalm 145:12), but I decided the timing made it a good choice.

I found myself wondering, as I read the first two lines, why the phrase “he is robed” was repeated. From what I understand about Hebrew (purely secondhand, from my husband’s studies in seminary), repetition is used to emphasize a point. I can understand using such emphasis on the majesty of God, or His might. But why the emphasis on “he is robed”?

I suppose the best way to understand this would be to learn more about the Hebrew word translated as “robed” and its uses in various contexts. I might be able to figure out something using my husband’s interlinear Bible and Strong’s concordance. But while I can do that reasonably well with Greek words in the New Testament, I find it harder to deal with the Hebrew, where I keep forgetting I have to read from right to left.

In any case, I found myself thinking about the possible significance of the word without having done any word study on it. If this were about a human king being robed with majesty, I would think it might have to do with the exceptional beauty of his garments, or perhaps an oblique hint at the fact that under the robes he is like the rest of us, and it is the robes and the office they signify that set him apart, rather than his own inherent qualities.

But of course with God it is quite the opposite. It is God’s own inherent qualities that set Him apart from us, and any reference to robes is purely metaphorical. To my ears, it sounds strange to emphasize the metaphor, rather than the real majesty with which God is metaphorically robed.

God is the Life-giving Lord

If you want a challenge, try defining the word life – without, of course, using the words live, living, or alive.

My husband sometimes tells about a teacher he had who told the class that fire was alive. After all, she pointed out, fire consumes fuel (eating), it grows, it moves, and it even reproduces (when one fire turns into multiple fires). Since they weren’t convinced, she challenged them to come up with a good explanation why she was wrong. I have to admit, I’d have trouble myself knowing quite how to go about forming the argument to refute her.

In case you’re having trouble coming up with a good definition of life, be assured that you are not alone. This article explains how difficult it is to formulate an adequate definition. If life is defined as something that can reproduce itself, sterile animals such as mules would not be considered living. If it is defined as a system that takes in energy to create order locally, crystals might be considered alive. And if it is defined as that which consumes energy to grow, move, or reproduce, fire could be considered living, as my husband’s teacher suggested.

Of course, that’s just trying to define biological life. God gives us not only physical life but also spiritual life. Any ideas on how to define that?

Both kinds of life are a lot easier to describe, or give examples of, than to define. And that’s fine – I’d rather spend my time and energy living than figuring out how to define what it is I’m doing. And the kind of life I’d like to be living is the kind described by Jesus as “abundant life.” I’m afraid my life often doesn’t seem very abundant – unless you count the stacks of dishes and clothes waiting to be washed.