"What is that to you?"

Stephen and I have been going through a one-year Bible, and today I read the end of the book of John, when Jesus asks Peter if he loves him and then tells Peter to feed his sheep. I really love this passage and blogged about it before, and I was reminded again of how like Peter I am. After Jesus has instructed Peter to feed his sheep, Peter is still not content but looks at John and asks Jesus, "What about him?" Jesus replies, "If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me." In other words, "Who is your focus? Is it John, or is it Me?" You must follow Me.

Last week at my church's music camp I had 5 girls under my care, and I had ample time to discover their individual personalities. One girl in particular--we'll call her Samantha--is a tattle-tale. She is constantly on the lookout for others to break the rules so she can then come to me and report it. She loves getting onto the other kids if she sees them doing wrong, and she constantly would look to me for affirmation of this behavior. But instead of affirming her for her policing of the entire group of children, I would tell her gently but firmly, "Samantha, you are not the leader here. You are not in charge of these kids. All you need to worry about is yourself." She would sigh in great annoyance and say, "Yeah, but what are you going to do with them?"

Samantha reminds me a lot of myself. I hate to say it, but I have a feeling I was a lot like her when I was younger. I relished opportunities to please others, especially those in authority, and I felt that a good way to do that would be to find what others were doing wrong and report it. (How did I have any friends??) All it came down to was a desire for attention and a yearning to feel significant, to feel as though I measured up. I imagine this is how Samantha feels, and how Peter felt. We want so much to feel significant, to feel as though we measure up, but then we look around at other people and wonder how in the world we'll ever make the grade. How could Peter, the one who denied Christ, be like John, the "disciple whom Jesus loved?" How could Samantha get attention unless she did so by pointing out the flaws of others? How can I ever feel successful in my weight loss when so many others are doing much better?

The answer is that we can't do it, and there's no need to even try. Just as Jesus exhorted Peter to follow Him, so also must I do the same. I don't have to look at other people for my example; Jesus is the perfect One! I don't have to worry about what other people think because it's not them I'm trying to please. Paul wrote in Galatians 1:10, "For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ." If there's anything I want, it's to be bonded to Christ. But I can't do that if I'm a slave to the world and its expectations. I can only serve one master, and Jesus is far better than anything the world has to offer. If I look to Him, I will be so blinded by His glory that I will see nothing else. So I fix my eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor. 4:18)

I must follow Him.

A New Kind of Spam

Now you can have insults delivered straight to your inbox! I have noticed a couple of these emails in my spam folder recently. It doesn't seem like the best way to get my attention.

One said, "You look really stupid." The other said, "Your face is ugly."

Sign up today for your own customized ego-deflating emails! Also available in "You're a fat tub of lard" and "You have a pea-sized brain."

*Sorry this is all I've got. I'm helping with my church's children's music camp (they're learning a musical--in a week--haha). And Stephen's parents are coming into town tomorrow night and staying through Monday, so the site will be blog-lite until then.

My Lack-of-Progress Report

As long as I have known how, I have read books. One of my earliest memories involves me getting caught reading Aesop's Fables in bed when I was supposed to be asleep (I had a very trusty little flashlight that allowed me to stay up many a night, unbeknownst to my parents). I would read during class, at meal times, in the car, everywhere. As I got older, I quit reading in class, but I still would take a book with me if I anticipated having any sort of downtime. In college I would read books when I should have been doing homework. But something shifted in grad school. There, reading was my job, even more so than it had been as an undergrad, and coupled with that "job" came the assisting and teaching of classes, which left me little time for "pleasure reading." During summers, I rejoiced in not being forced to read, and I would read a lot of fluff, books I'm sure my professors would have been horrified to see me reading (although who knows, perhaps they too are closet fluff-readers).

Now, 4 weeks into the Summer Book Project of 2008, I have yet to complete a single book (although I'm about 100 pages shy of finishing the MacDonald fairy tales. In 4 weeks, I haven't finished a single book! I'm deeply disturbed by the fact that I have all kinds of free time, and yet I am not reading. No wait, I am reading. Blogs, news headlines, the SparkPeople message boards, facebook posts. Just not any books. How have I come to this point? I have always considered myself a reader, but now that self-descriptive phrase appears to no longer apply.

I recently read an article in The Atlantic that might shed light on my current existential crisis. The author surmises that the Internet (namely, Google) has decreased people's abilities to digest larger works of literature because everything people now "consume" in a literary sense is in the form of a blog or news headlines or facebook wall posts (my examples, not his entirely). In short, the Internet has changed the way we think, absorb, and process information. Our brains have become adept at skimming over information, looking for only what we came to find, and so we no longer linger over words as perhaps we were wont to do. I found this particular passage to be quite enlightening:

"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

This describes my plight exactly! Reading is a struggle (even reading the whole article was difficult), and it almost physically pains me to write out that little confession, but there it is. And it's not as though this problem is inconsequential; for Nicholas Carr (the author of the article), this crisis of the mind is of utmost importance: "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."

Is there any cure for me? Anyone have any ideas of how to combat this? My very existence as a reader is at stake.