Chickadees

ByHal Hammons

A flock of what appeared to be black-capped chickadees descended on the church property this week.  (Forgive me, Mom, if I’m ornithologically incorrect here.)  Tiny little things, just hopping all over the place looking for seeds.  Peck.  Hop.  Peck.  Hop.  Peck.  I went online to see if I was correct, found out that chickadees look very much like the birds I saw but typically are not found in this area, then found out that, yes, they have been spotted quite frequently, then dashed to the window to double-check, only to find they had decided to do their little dance somewhere else.

Theirs is the behavior attributed to the apostle Paul by the Athenian elite back in the day.  The term “idle babbler” in Acts 17:18 is literally translated “seed-pecker.”  The idea, it seems, is that some so-called intellects in Athens just danced from philosophy to philosophy, gathering up whatever bits and pieces of wisdom might suit them, and then cobbled them together to make “something new” (Acts 17:21) — worth a hearing, perhaps, but little more.

Of course, Paul’s gospel was anything but a mishmash of personal notions; his gospel, the only one worth preaching (Galatians 1:8-9), was delivered directly through “a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12).  He preached it all, and nothing but.

Spiritual chickadees do fly around us from time to time, though.  They will dart and dash through the gospel, looking for “the good bits” and ignoring the rest.  But salvation is not a do-it-yourself matter.  We sit down to the feast prepared for us — all of it — or we “make excuses” like the dinner guests in Luke 14:18.  There is no in-between. 

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Thanksgiving

ByHal Hammons

The problem with having a day on the calendar specifically dedicated to the giving of thanks is twofold: one, we are tempted to save our expressions of thanksgiving for “the day”; two, when that day arrives, we wind up repeating ourselves.  How can something so sacred be ignored and cliché at the same time?  And how do we avoid them both?

“Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth”

ByHal Hammons

Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6:10, “For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”   I like the way the New American Standard Bible reads here — “a root” instead of “the root,” as it is translated elsewhere.  It is silly to suggest that the love of money is “the” cause of evil in this world.  But it is certainly “a” cause — and one that rears its ugly head in all sorts of circumstances. 

Niksen: The art of doing your best work by doing nothing at all

ByHal Hammons

Doing something is not always the right choice.  Sometimes it is better to do nothing.  Nothing at all.  It’s a concept the Dutch call niksen.  It encourages people to deliberately take time every day — especially the busiest days — to sit motionless, gaze out a window at nothing in particular, whatever it takes to disengage your mind and body.

American workers, always with the go-go-go mentality, tend to view this approach with disdain.  It’s lazy.  It’s wasteful.  The only proper way to work is full throttle, full time.  On a related note, American workers suffer greatly from depression, stress, high blood pressure, and divorce.  A connection, perhaps?

Nerf

ByHal Hammons

A 9-year-old boy in Wales has lost an eye to a Nerf gun.  This is not the beginning of a joke.  This is the conclusion to a two-act tragedy.  It seems he lost sight in the eye because of an incident with a toy arrow when he was only 3; the second incident caused irreversible damage to the eye, forcing him to have it removed entirely or else risk losing sight in the second eye as well.

The mother, who is raising money through crowdfunding to get her son a more realistic prosthetic eye, says she doesn’t want people to think she is a bad mother.  I wonder why she would feel compelled to say that?