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The Greatest Waste

My dad told me something about my grandpa once.  My grandpa was an orphan; he didn’t see a picture of his birth mother until his late 60s. My grandpa had an inimitable wit, a charming sense of humor, a wife he loved and devoted himself to tirelessly for over forty years, and eight children. What he did for a living I don’t think there is a name for anymore; he was a repairman, engineer, inventor, and tinkerer. What job title his employer, GE, had given him I don’t have any idea. He was a Jack-of-all-trades, just as handy with wood as he was content with a beer in his hand. He was loving, delightful, no pushover, a man through and through, and a devout Catholic. He looked like Frank Sinatra when he was young and a bit like John Wayne when he got older. I got to know all kinds of things about my grandpa. It was impossible not to learn about the man if you were around him, because he was so genuinely himself at all times. I got to learn all about him because my dad liked to tal
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Sin

"I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts..." The dominant understanding about what 'sin' is among non-Christians, lapsed Christians, and far too many practicing Christians is that 'sin' is primarily a list of things that are "bad to do." Though this understanding isn't wrong, it is woefully incomplete after childhood ends. If this view of sin never matures, than we encounter a host of confusion in our lives, are left baffled by apparent tragedy and failure, and will never grasp the first things about human nature. Under this understanding, Christianity as a whole quickly becomes absolutely prohibitive and cruel. Take homosexuals, for example. You've got these two men who seem really, really , nice. They appear happy and functional. They are patient and civilized, even in the face of judgmental accusations of "sin" hurled at them. And to top it all off, they believe they are in love . What stands in the way of
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Words: Family

Words, like all good things–people, for instance–have and convey by their very existence  meaning . That is why language can be foul. That is why words of love can make us cry with deep emotion. The age of the internet has given rise to a whole new set of words that have and convey meaning that simply didn't exist before. I think this is an example of the correct use of language; it's function is to convey what is meant. If you want to mean something new, you come up with a new word. However, I don't think that attaching new meanings to already existing words or new words to old meanings is such a good practice. Why? What could be the harm of just changing the meaning of a word? Or expanding it a little? Simple: The harm is that we don't just use words to express our thoughts, we think in words , and changing the meaning of words is a subversive attempt to change the way we think about things . First example: Family Family. You can call things whatever you want, y
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Being Offensive and Responsibility

It's always irked me when someone raises the stakes in an argument and says "you've offended me!" I understand that some things are just plain offensive–filthy sexual jokes, shirts with senseless hateful messages on them, tasteless halloween costumes –but it seems to me that the widely held belief is that these things are wrong because they are offensive . This, I believe, is dangerously false. The above list of things are not wrong because they are offensive; they are offensive because they are wrong . This is an important distinction. Stating it this way makes it clear that "offending" someone in and of itself is amoral. It alone is neither right nor wrong; it is just the result of their reaction to your words or actions. That being said, context and care for how someone will receive something is always in good order and is an ever-essential part of Christian charity. But I want to talk about those things which we say to or do in front of our peers
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Being Uncomfortable

The concept of training  is familiar to every athlete. There are countless ways in which to train; a plethora of strategies and schools of thought on how to go about it. However, they all have at least one common element: in order to improve, the trainee must commit to making himself uncomfortable in every session, day after day after day. In fact, my dad once said he thought of that point where you get uncomfortable as the starting point of the workout, and the pushing you do after that is the deciding element for the gains you make. Every workout, the athlete willingly takes on a load (be it weight, time, distance, etc.) that is progressively more difficult. The goal is that bearing a certain load become much easier and the athlete become more proficient at bearing it. Another common element of training is one that is pretty obvious but still important: timing. You have to train–choose to take on the load–with a fair amount of foresight; you have to start training long before the tim
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