RSS

Okay, so I should start of saying that I'm well aware that I'm setting myself up to get hammered here because, for those of you who recognize the name, George Banks, you realize it comes from the movie, Mary Poppins, and, after giving mfer all kinds of grief for bringing up Pollyanna on a recent episode of the Super Average Podcast, well, enough said.

Anyway, Mary Poppins is on my radar because Robbie has decided that it's his favorite movie. At first, we thought he always picked it because it was in the standard issue, monstrously huge, Disney VHS box that really jacks up any storage system. However, when we moved other Disney movies to the forefront, he started picking through all of them until he found Mary Poppins. So, in our home lately, it's been Mary Poppins on a daily basis.

This morning, Robbie was all stuffed up and couldn't sleep so we came out to the living room, I gave him some medicine to help with his stuffy nose, and we popped Mary into the VCR. Luckily he fell asleep in my lap about 15 minutes later and I was able to dose off as well, that is, until I heard chimney sweeps dancing on the roofs of London and singing, "Step in Line". My eyes opened, my head cleared, and I realized that this scene comes right after the whole bank incident that results in the stuffy and emotionally disconnected George Banks to lose his job.

The sweeps dancing scene is followed by a conversation between Burt and George Banks that serves as the impetus for Banks to reconsider his priorities and, by the end of the movie, has him lovin' up on his kids like a daddy should.

So, right after watching this, I do a quick scan through the RSS feeds and run across an "occasional update" by jWinters on being a workaholic. Now, I don't have workaholic issues according to the quote on j's blog, but I do have issues with being a passionate worker (my work is like a hobby that pays so I, all to often, happily put in long hours, be it at home or on the road).

The problem is, being passionate about one area of vocation (work), can often result in the neglect of other vocations (being a husband, dad, etc.). This means that for those of us who love our work, we need to be extra careful to make sure we maintain an even greater passion in our more important vocations. This seems to be what we get from George Banks at the end of Mary Poppins, after all, he ultimately remained a partner at the bank, but he also had his family as a priority.

As I woke up this morning with Robbie sleeping safe and sound in my arms, I felt like I was doing a reasonable job ... but there have been other times where I know I've failed. Moreover, with the launch of the Writings in the Wilderness LHM Lent devotions site (next week), the Fishbowl in a couple months, and the eLife getting ready to go live, I know that the coming months will present many opportunities to be overly passionate at work and negligent at home.

So, how do I try and counter this and remain passionate at home? I try to not do work on Wednesday and just spend the day with Robbie while Anita is at work. Then, when my mom has Robbie on Thursday while Anita works, I try and do some of the housework so Anita isn't stressed when she gets home. I'm also trying, although often failing, to head to bed when Anita does so we can have a few minutes to talk in the evening. Making a point of flirting with Anita throughout the day also seems to keep things balanced. However, I'm curious what others out there are doing so that you look more like the second George Banks than the first? It would be great to hear from workaholics and passionate workers.

I helped a couple of friends move the other day and while we were taking a breather one of the guys mentioned how much more attention Michael Vick is receiving compared to OJ Simpson back in the mid-90's. On a quick reflection I agreed with him, but then, this morning, as I ran through my RSS feeds, I rethought my initial reaction.

Back in the 90's I had three main sources of information, the nightly news, the morning paper, and the radio. Given that I listened to music over talk, this meant I'd get a combined 4 OJ hits a day. Today, I no longer watch the evening news and I don't read the newspaper so my traditional media hits have cut in half (the 2 from the radio). However, I do follow three news podcasts which bumps me up to 5 hits a day. Then, when you add in RSS feeds from CNN, ESPN, CBS Sportsline, and the Rocky Mountain News, we're now at 9 hits a day. Add in 2 more on the average day from the news ticker on the Denver Newspaper Agency building and we're up to 11. My point is, there is just that much more information out there that is saturating our lives.

But, it's not just the amount of information that's changed in the past decade, the sources of our information are also changing. I ran across this post today which points out that Google is now indexing blogs at close to real-time speeds. And before anyone goes thinking this is only for blogs that are in the 1,000's of visits a day range, my blog, just like the example, is ranked as a 4 according to Google's PageRank system, which means what I'm posting now will be available via Google search within minutes. When you combine this with services like Technorati and Del.icio.us, it's not just an increase in volume of information but a dramatic increase of easily searchable sources of information meaning that voices that would have never been heard a decade ago are now just as accessible as the voices of the "big boys".

More info, more voices, more views ... how can we possibly process it all in a functional way?

One of the RSS feeds that I subscribe to is Fire and Knowledge by Joshua Sowin. It's a different site in that it, for the most part, doesn't contain original material, but largely consists of quotes from books the blogger reads. Here's todays:

Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. (John Ames in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004), 208)

As I read this I began to wonder if the radio and TV are being replaced in the younger generations. For those who are a bit older you have Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen, Oprah and the like. However, these faith and life gurus, from what I've seen, don't have the same popularity among the teens, twenties, and thirties crowd as they do with those who are forty and up (although there could be some other categories that mark the divide).

However, even without these gurus leading the way, the "theological sense of a jackrabbit" still flows in abundance in the form of an individual's speculation. In other words, instead of having one Joyce Meyer, one Joel Osteem, and one Oprah, everybody gets to be their own.

At the conference I attended last week Leonard Sweet made the comment, "You can't understand something until you stand under it." This would be a brief summary of a post-critical methodology of interpretation. Rather than previous approaches where we set the object of study on the table and we would dissect it, the post-critical approach suggests that we become the ones on the table who are being examined and in the process, defined.

There's a song by Rich Mullins called "Creed" and in it he sings, "I believe what I believe, it's what makes me what I am, and I did not make it, no it is making me, it is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man." What would happen if we, as Christians, allowed the Bible to function as the Word of God that speaks into our lives and, in the process, redefines us? What if we put aside what makes sense to us and instead actually stood under the Word of God? What if?