Category Archives: Book Reviews

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Too Much of a Good Thing WILL Kill You

In today’s encore excerpt – dopamine, pleasure, and too much pleasure:

“The importance of dopamine was discovered by accident. In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner, two neuroscientists at McGill University, decided to implant an electrode deep into the center of a rat’s brain. The precise placement of the electrode was largely happenstance; at the time, the geography of the mind remained a mystery. But Olds and Milner got lucky. They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. Whenever you eat a piece of chocolate cake, or listen to a favorite pop song, or watch your favorite team win the World Series, it is your NAcc that helps you feel so happy.

“But Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. They placed the electrodes in several rodents’ brains and then ran a small current into each wire, making the NAccs continually excited. The scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just huddle in the corners of their cages, transfixed by their bliss. Within days, all of the animals had perished. They died of thirst.

“It took several decades of painstaking research, but neuroscientists eventually discovered that the rats had been suffering from an excess of dopamine. The stimulation of the NAcc triggered a massive release of the neurotransmitter, which overwhelmed the rodents with ecstasy. In humans, addictive drugs work the same way: a crack addict who has just gotten a fix is no different than a rat in an electrical rapture. The brains of both creatures have been blinded by pleasure. This, then, became the dopaminergic cliche; it was the chemical explanation for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

“But happiness isn’t the only feeling that dopamine produces. Scientists now know that this neurotransmitter helps to regulate all of our emotions, from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. It is the common neural currency of the mind, the molecule that helps us decide among alternatives. By looking at how dopamine works inside the brain, we can see why feelings are capable of providing deep insights. While Plato disparaged emotions as irrational and untrustworthy – the wild horses of the soul – they actually reflect an enormous amount of invisible analysis.”

Author: Jonah Lehrer
Title: How We Decide
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date: Copyright 2009 by Jonah Lehrer
Pages: Kindle Loc. 463-538.

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Reconciliation, apartheid, stride toward freedom

I have been reading national geographic magazine for almost 20 years now, and I have never been moved to tears by any articles in the magazine until now.

In high school, I read Martin Luther King’s book: Stride Toward Freedom, and I wrote a paper based on his chapter titled: “the pilgrimage to non-violence”. It was inspiring and eye opening to me to read and write about.

25 years later, this National Geographic article has had a similar sublime effect on me.

National Geographic Magazine June 2010

Mandela’s Children

South Africa is a vibrant, multiethnic democracy striving, with mixed success, to fulfill its promise. Photojournalist James Nachtwey offers a vision of contemporary life, and Alexandra Fuller tells an intimate story about the long shadow of apartheid.

The Minister

It turns out there is no shortcut, bolt-of-inspiration way to transform a person from layman to minister in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa. It takes seven years of rigorous training—seven years of Deon Snyman’s youth—which made it all the more distressing when, toward the end of his studies at the University of Pretoria in 1990, Snyman realized he had all the theology a person could possibly need to function in the old South Africa but almost no skills to guide him in the country that had just released Nelson Mandela.

Snyman, who was born and raised in “a traditional Afrikaans family, in a typical Afrikaans town north of Johannesburg,” says that back then he knew no black people, had no black friends, had never even had a meaningful conversation with a black person. “The church was divided into white congregations, Coloured congregations, Indian congregations, and black congregations,” he says. He decided that the best way he could avoid waking up one morning a foreigner in his own country was to become the minister of a rural, black congregation.

On the day in February 1992 that Deon Snyman was installed as a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa—the church’s black branch—in Nongoma, in the heart of the KwaZulu homeland, his 54-year-old father stood up in front of the congregation, all of whom were Zulus, and said this: “Well, it is clear that South Africa is going to change. But I am an Afrikaner. I do not know if I have the capacity to change. Also, I am an old man. I do not know if I have the skills to change.” Then the father indicated his 26-year-old son. “So today, I give you my son. If you can teach him the rules of the new South Africa, he can teach us those rules. If you can give him the skills to live in this new country, he can show us those skills.”

In the dozen years Snyman lived among the Zulus as a minister, it became clear that the lesson he had to take back to his own people was this: “Those who supported the system of apartheid need to apologize in a way that will feel sincere. Then they need to make amends in a way that restores some of the dignity and some of the material opportunities that had been eroded under that system.” Snyman started to think about the idea of community-led restitution—the creation, he says, of such emblems of remorse as a school, a clinic, or a skills training center. “Something everyone could point to and say, Here is our symbol of true sorryness, here is a symbol of our decision to build a new way to work together. It was a very deep idea in me.”

But it would be years before Snyman’s imagination was captured by a small Afrikaans farming town in the Western Cape, a community unable to deny that the effects of apartheid had spilled on beyond 1994, when white rule ended and Nelson Mandela became the reborn nation’s first president.

The Town

Worcester is a somnolent, gingerbread town prickled with white church spires an hour and a half northeast of Cape Town. In winter, the surrounding mountains are snowcapped. In summer, heat holds like hell’s breath in the valley and melts the tarmac. The streets are wide and orderly. The houses are gabled and picturesque; lawns are cajoled into neat pockets; there are steroidal roses and trellises hanging grapevines off verandas. It’s the sort of town that makes you wish you’d worn a longer skirt and a higher collar.

In the mid-1990s the lines drawn deep in the geography and psyche of the place by apartheid were still evident, but no more so than elsewhere in the country. It is true that blacks still lived mainly in Zwelethemba township—Worcester’s undernourished twin across the Hex River—while whites still lived on the dappled streets of the town itself or on farms laid at the feet of the mountains. On the other hand, Worcester had elected its first Coloured (mixed race) mayor and its first black deputy mayor. Also, in June 1996 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)—a courtlike body assembled after the abolition of apartheid—had held a hearing in the town. Victims and perpetrators of torture and abuse under apartheid had stepped forward and testified. The violent past was over, surely.

So it came as a shock when, on a sweltering Christmas Eve afternoon in 1996, two bombs ripped through a shopping area just down the street from the police station and the Dutch Reformed Church. The blasts killed four people—three of them children. Nearly 70 people were injured. All the victims were blacks and Coloureds. The first bomb to go off, around 1:20, hit Olga Macingwane in such a way that her legs swelled instantly to the size of tractor tires. Minutes later, the second bomb went off, and she was blown unconscious.

“For 13 years I never saw the person who did this to me,” Macingwane says, speaking from her sitting room in Zwelethemba on a very warm Sunday morning in late November 2009. Macingwane is a profoundly proper woman of a certain age. She is wearing a pink, ankle-length pencil skirt and matching jacket. Outside her home the township is in the midst of open-air church services, and Macingwane has to raise her voice to be heard. She gets up stiffly—it is obviously painful for her to walk—and closes the door to the yard and to the world at large. The singing reaches into her home unabated. “In my head,” she continues, as the choirs of at least three churches compete on the torrid air, “I pictured him. In my head he is a man of 50 years old, very big, with a long beard and a very severe face. That is the man who did this thing. That is the person I see in my nightmares.”

A Turning Point

South Africa’s selection to host the 2010 World Cup gave people a surge of confidence. Their nation could now be remembered for bringing the world soccer rather than apartheid. South Africa’s modern infrastructure, enviably chic airports, cosmopolitan restaurants—its public face—all support the suggestion that its tragic history is just that, history. Much of Soweto, Johannesburg’s infamous township in which apartheid-era violence visible to the foreign media occurred, is now a series of bucolic suburbs: Florida-lite architecture behind smooth lawns, sleek foreign cars in driveways. (Squatter camps encroaching, it is true.) South Africa has a burgeoning black middle class, and since 1994 the government has built almost three million houses. In Johannesburg, just across the road from a casino and an amusement park, tourists can visit the impressive Apartheid Museum.

But scratch the surface of any community, and one way or another there it is, the A-word. In May 2008 more than 60 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced in xenophobic riots targeting mainly Mozambicans and Zimbabweans. Apartheid ensured a deep mistrust of “other” and a sense of resource entitlement—based as much, if not more, on who you were as on what you did—that carries over to this day.

It is impossible to overestimate the reach and brutality of apartheid. Between 1948 and 1994, when the system was dismantled, the Afrikaans National Party applied hyper-segregation of races to every possible facet of life. “Apartheid so effectively enriched a few at the utter debasement of the majority—to say nothing of the imprisonment of so many, the exile, the disappearances, the violent deaths—that a mere end to the system could not begin to repair the damage,” Tshepo Madlingozi says. Madlingozi is a 31-year-old senior lecturer of law at the University of Pretoria and an advocacy coordinator for the Khulumani Support Group, an organization of 58,000 victims of political violence, mainly during the apartheid era. “You can say, Everybody is equal now; let’s get on with it. That suits those who benefited from the system—but it does nothing to institute restorative justice, and it can’t undo generations of habitual racism, palpable hate, or feelings of inadequacy.”

The Prisoner

Less than a month after the Worcester bombing, 19-year-old Daniel Stephanus “Stefaans” Coetzee phoned the police from his hideout on a farm in the heart of the Great Karoo highlands—a sparsely populated, semiarid region in the central west of the country—and claimed responsibility for his part in the atrocity. Coetzee addressed the police officer in charge with respectful deference: “Oom,” he called him. “Uncle.” He said he had heard that there were children among the dead, and for that reason he had no choice but to turn himself in. The boy had reserved country manners and a country person’s way of keeping himself contained, catlike.

At the time he was taken into custody, and for some years after, Coetzee was a member of nearly every extreme right-wing, white supremacist group in South Africa, including one or two so secret and obscure that not even the people in them seem capable of explaining exactly what they are: Wit Wolwe, Israel Visie, Boere Aanvals Troepe. From prison Coetzee continued to communicate with members of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and neo-Nazi groups in Germany, encouraging them in their endeavors. He rose up the ranks of the national groups’ pseudo-military structures. As white supremacists go, Coetzee was a poster boy. In the pecking order of the Helderstroom Maximum Security Prison in Western Cape Province, however, he was pond life. “I was 19 years old and white. Everyone wanted to rape me,” Coetzee says of those first years in overcrowded general cells holding between 60 and 120 men. “I couldn’t get a bottom bunk. I couldn’t even get a top bunk. I couldn’t get any bunk at all.” Coetzee slept on the floor.

When I meet him in Pretoria Central Prison in November 2009, where he has been held for over a decade, Coetzee has just turned 32. Having not felt the sun for so long, his skin has leached gray, and although he is strikingly young looking, there is a cluster of fine lines around his eyes such as are usually seen only on a much older man. His hair is dark, very short, and downy. The leather belt he uses to hold up his prison-issue orange overalls is pulled to its last hole. It is not a surprise to learn that before his incarceration he was able to run far and fast in blistering heat with very little fuel or water. “I loved to run,” he says, as if the words might set his legs free again. “Ja, I could run.”

Coetzee and I sit facing each other, knee to knee, in a large, nondescript, yellow room designed for prison visits. Five or six windows along one wall let in a sluggish light that does nothing to enhance the greenish glow from the fluorescents. It is late morning and raining hard, and has been since early last night. As a result, it is cold, and we’re both shivering.

Coetzee tells me he was born in 1977 to a careless mother and a drunken father. He has no memory of his parents being together. At first he lived with his father in the Orange Free State (now the Free State). When he was eight or nine his father burned out. After spending time in an orphanage, Coetzee was sent to live with his mother in Upington in the Northern Cape. For the next six or seven years Coetzee fell through one crack after another and was in and out of welfare homes, until at the age of 15 or 16 he was taken under the wing of a man named Johannes van der Westhuizen. A leader in the ultraright-wing, white supremacist cult Israel Visie, van der Westhuizen was a strict vegetarian, took no drugs, drank no alcohol, and studied a Bible that had been rewritten to bolster the idea that anyone who was not white was an animal of the field. In Coetzee’s eyes, van der Westhuizen was roughly the size and age of a father.

If you were to walk more or less 300 miles northeast of Cape Town until the night sky grew so black you could see all the way back to whatever might be the beginning of time, the odds are good that you would be in the Great Karoo highlands. In the early 1800s this is where outlaws, cattle rustlers, and gunrunners hid, in the vast plains below the bruised Nuweveld Range. Even today so few people are tough or crazy enough to coax a living from this flinty, pepper-scented earth that it’s considered a perfect destination for stargazers—and those who do not wish the modern world to find them. Its remote secretiveness appealed to van der Westhuizen, a man in deep denial about the reality of post-transition South Africa, and it was on his leased farm in this redoubt that the bombing was planned.

“When I was first in prison, I asked for a Bible,” Coetzee says, explaining how he began to dismantle the hatred that had landed him on the floor of a crowded cell in a maximum-security prison. “But the Bible they gave me was not the same Bible I studied when I was with van der Westhuizen. I realized that the Bible I had been reading with him was skewed. That was the first thing.” Then Coetzee was transferred to Pretoria Central Prison, where he took classes on anger management and restorative justice. He wrote a letter to the prison authorities asking if they would allow him to apologize to the people and the families he had hurt. (They advised against it.) But although he felt remorse for what he had done, Coetzee was still a racist.

In early 2002, five years after his arrest, he was assigned to a work detail with an older prisoner, Eugene de Kock. Now in his early 60s, de Kock is serving two life sentences plus 212 years for crimes against humanity committed while he was a colonel heading the notorious secret security unit of the South African Police. (His men dubbed him “prime evil,” a name adopted by the media.) For hours at a time the two men would be together mopping floors. “Eugene was always telling me, ‘Look Stefaans, you have to stop believing you are superior just because of the color of your skin,’ ” Coetzee says. “He said, ‘Take it from me, I’ve learned the hard way.’ I told Eugene, ‘Please stop pestering me.’ But he never shut up about it. He told me that until I stopped being a racist I’d be in two prisons—one around my body, and another one around my heart.”

The Conversation

It is true that if every child from a difficult home in South Africa were to grow up and perform an act of brutality, there would be nothing and no one left in the country. As it is, there are 50 murders every day, and 140 reported rapes, although the actual number is believed to be in the hundreds. “Yes, the habit of violence is very deep in this culture,” Marjorie Jobson, national director of the Khulumani Support Group, says. “You have to remember, the children who grew up in the atmosphere of apartheid—with all the lessons of that era—those children are now adults.”

I have caught a lift with Jobson—a disarmingly mild-mannered doctor in her 50s—from Johannesburg, and we’re driving through the outskirts of Pretoria on a blameless summer afternoon in late 2009. From here, South Africa’s administrative capital seems all flowering impatience—50,000 jacarandas lend the city a mildly campy glamour, and the streets are lined with beds of agapanthus. Advertisements for the World Cup are everywhere; a high-speed-train track is being built parallel to the road.

“Everyone was exhausted by 1994. I think they just wanted apartheid to go away and the government to fix everything. But that didn’t happen,” Jobson says. “It’s up to each individual South African to participate actively in restitution. You know, the power of one. The power one person has to perpetuate our violent past, or the power one person has to contribute to a just, peaceful society.”

In this way our conversation comes back to Coetzee. Sometime in 2004 Jobson received a phone call from Eugene de Kock. Over the years de Kock has tried to help Khulumani locate people who disappeared during the struggle, describing in some detail the manner in which they vanished, mostly because he was responsible for what happened to them. De Kock told Jobson that he had become acquainted over the previous couple of years with a young man called Stefaans Coetzee. “Stefaans wanted to meet with his victims and apologize for what he had done,” she says. Jobson wasn’t opposed to being helpful. The only problem was that Coet zee had no idea who his victims were. He could give no names and—beyond the fact that three of the dead had been children—no identifying characteristics.

The Presidents

In 2005 Thabo Mbeki, in his second term as South Africa’s president, fired Jacob Zuma, the deputy president. Zuma had been implicated in a corruption scandal involving a five-billion-dollar arms deal. (Charges were dropped in April 2009.) Mbeki must have thought ridding himself of this troublesome high priest of populism was a safe bet. But it turned out to be the political kiss of death, causing a deep split within the ruling party, the African National Congress, or ANC. By the end of the year Zuma’s supporters were burning T-shirts with Mbeki’s face on them.

Zuma and Mbeki, although both longtime ANC activists, could not be more unalike. Mbeki is a Xhosa from the Eastern Cape, highly educated and emotionally remote. Zuma is a Zulu from KwaZulu-Natal with no formal education who served a decade-long sentence on Robben Island for opposing apartheid. A charismatic man of action, he has three wives and a rape allegation to his name. (He was acquitted in 2006.)

In 2007 Mbeki announced to both houses of parliament that he had authorized a special dispensation for pardon applications for politically motivated crimes that had taken place between 1994 and 1999. Mbeki’s official explanation was that he wished to finish the business of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Unofficially the move was seen by some as an effort to gain much needed support for the flagging president. The next year a group with a representative from each of the 15 official political parties recommended 120 prisoners for presidential pardon.

“It was an attempt to reach out politically,” Tshepo Madlingozi of the University of Pretoria says. But the process ignored something that had been at the moral, emotional, and political heart of the TRC—the victims would not be consulted before prisoners were granted amnesty. To human rights groups, this special dispensation was not about reconciliation; it was about political expediency, about closing the door and moving on. Eight organizations, including the Khulumani Support Group, filed a lawsuit, which eventually found itself at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the highest court in the land, on November 10, 2009. By then Mbeki had resigned, and Zuma—JZ as he is popularly known—was president.

The Go-Between

On the list of political prisoners identified for possible pardon, one name jumped out at Marjorie Jobson: the man Eugene de Kock had telephoned her about from prison, Stefaans Coetzee. Meanwhile, Khulumani had reached out to the victims, including Olga Macingwane, of those on the list.

A glance through Jobson’s modest home in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape reveals books everywhere, piled on furniture in the sitting room, in stacks on the floor, across the dining room table. “On the one hand, the Khulumani group was part of a lawsuit to ensure that the rights of victims were taken into account in this pardoning process,” Jobson says, clearing books off the kitchen table so we can eat lunch. “On the other hand, I was getting more calls all the time from Stefaans’s social worker and his minister, begging me to see if I could get him together with his victims. Not surprisingly, the victims of the Worcester bombing were skeptical. They had questions. Why does he want to meet us now? How is it going to benefit us? Is he feeling guilty now? Has he really had a change of heart?” Jobson sets a bowl of chicken noodle soup in front of me. In her distraction, she fails to eat at all. “I was interested in justice,” she continues, “but I was most interested in the process of reconciliation. It was a conundrum.” In the end Jobson appealed for help to a trusted colleague: Tshepo Madlingozi.

On the day I meet him in his law faculty office, Madlingozi is wearing black jeans, a long-sleeved, blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and casual leather sneakers. Our conversation is accompanied by the customary cup of tea. “Rooibos or normal?” Madlingozi had asked, offering either South Africa’s native herbal tea or ordinary black tea. Now he blows into his cup and looks at me over the rim. “We made a decision that I should go and see Coetzee and see if he was for real. I was very nervous, very skeptical. I didn’t know how I was going to react.”

A day in mid-April 2009 was set for a meeting between Madlingozi and Coetzee in the social worker’s office at Pretoria Central. “I was expecting someone in my imagination that looked very racist, you know, not this guy who walks into the office. I see a boy the same age as me. He’s somehow handsome, very diffident. He was surprised too. He was expecting to see an old, radical, militant ANC activist.”

Madlingozi shook hands with Coetzee and introduced himself. Coetzee shook Madlingozi’s hand and thanked him for coming. The two men sat for a couple of hours and talked. “Mostly about ourselves,” Madlingozi says. “What does he miss in prison? How did I become a lawyer? How did he become a prisoner? What do we hope for ourselves? What do we hope for our country?”

Madlingozi is a few months younger than Coetzee. He was born in Mangaung township, the area set aside for blacks outside Bloemfontein in the former Orange Free State—geographically not far from where Coetzee was born but a world away in terms of culture. “It was semidesolate and very violent,” he says. Madlingozi’s father was a migrant worker in the gold mines. “Migrant labor was one of the most devastating aspects of the system of apartheid,” Madlingozi says. “It destroyed families. It destroyed communities. It was a way for the apartheid government to get capitalization, but it emasculated men who couldn’t be at home to provide for their families. The fathers couldn’t pass on folklore, culture, values. For the families left behind, it meant the father came back after three months and didn’t know his place in the family. A lot of men asserted their position through violence.”

Madlingozi’s father died of a heart attack when his son was 14. “My mom and I had just relocated to a mining town to be near him. We were just becoming friends again. He had a voracious appetite for reading novels, and we read together a lot.” Madlingozi finished his schooling in Welkom, a gold-mining town laid out in the late 1940s by the Anglo American Corporation. The mines in and around the town are very deep. Each morning, brackish water is pumped from them into pans on the surface. Flocks of flamingos, Egyptian geese, and sacred ibises congregate on the pans. The air is stung with the scents of salt and bird droppings.

Madlingozi leans forward. “Meeting Stefaans has reignited my faith in the future of South Africa,” he says. “My worldview is black consciousness, and that hasn’t changed as a result of knowing Stefaans. But it has made me appreciate that even the most ardent racists—even murderers—can change and be humble. Yes, Stefaans’s intelligence, humility, acute appreciation of the consequences of his actions and the system of apartheid, as well as his appreciation that reconciliation is not merely about showing goodwill, have greatly inspired me.” Madlingozi has both hands under his chin now. “I can see how there might be people criticizing me for selling out. How can I visit this man? How can I have empathy? But this isn’t just about winning. It can’t be about winning. If we only want to win, then there will always be losers, and how is that so different from the way things were? This has always been about the big picture, about moving on together.” Then he laughs and looks at me, almost challengingly. “Mmm, it’s complicated, messy—it can be very personal and always in shades of gray. But that’s where reality is. That’s where we are. That’s what we have to work with.”

The Victim

From Worcester to Pretoria is a two-day drive—16 hours, more or less. Marjorie Jobson has arranged for Olga Ma cingwane and three other residents of Zwelethemba to rent a car and drive up for the constitutional court hearing on November 10, 2009. The four of them agree to meet Stefaans Coetzee the day before the hearing, but only on the condition that they are not doing so to forgive him. “I am not there to forgive him,” Macingwane says firmly. “I am there to face the man in my head. I want to hear what he has to say for himself. But no, I am not there to forgive him.”

Life became difficult for Olga Macingwane after the bombing, and not only for all the obvious reasons. Cadres of the ANC used the funerals for political posturing, racing disabled survivors of the attack through the streets in their wheelchairs, all the while chanting songs made popular during the struggle. Then in 2003 Macingwane’s husband died, and without his support, she could no longer afford to raise their three children. They were sent away to live with relatives. A laminated photograph of Ma cingwane’s husband reveals the exact match you would pick for Olga. He stands before a 1970s polished yellow Datsun in a three-piece suit exuding an aura of conservative reserve. The yellow car is still parked outside Macingwane’s house, dormant under a thick gray blanket.

November 9 is a hot day. Macingwane and the other three residents of Zwelethemba—including Harris Sibeko, husband of the deputy mayor at the time of the attack—walk into the social worker’s office at Pretoria Central and see Coetzee standing in the corner in his orange jumpsuit stamped with the word “prisoner.” “I was shocked,” Macingwane says later. “What I see is a boy. Not the man I have had in my mind all these years, but a boy. What is this boy doing here? How did it happen? That is what is inside my head all of a sudden.”

Macingwane asks to begin with a prayer. In the ensuing silence she gets to her knees—laboriously, because two days in a rental car have done nothing to help the pain in her legs—and begins to pray in Xhosa. She praises God for his hallowedness. She thanks God for bringing South Africa another day. She asks God to forgive her trespasses, as she will forgive others their trespasses against her. She asks God to see that his will be done in this room today. Then she takes her seat. While her colleagues mop their brows and fan themselves against the heat, Macingwane maintains her composure.

The meeting takes place in a mixture of Xhosa, Afrikaans, and English. Macingwane is mostly silent. “He must explain himself before I speak,” she says at the outset.

Coetzee does not talk about his childhood. He speaks about the planning that went into the bombing, how he was chosen for his excellent military skills, the years he has spent in prison. He asks for their questions, and the group responds. How did he learn to hate black people? How did he unlearn this hatred? How does he spend his days now? Is he sorry? And if he is so sorry, what can he give them? Coetzee admits he has nothing material to give the world except the leather belt that holds up his overalls. But, he says, God willing, if he gets out of jail, he can begin to attempt to compensate for what he has done. “There are children now in South Africa,” he says, “children without parents. They might be tempted to get into violent gangs, to follow anger instead of love.” He says, “I can show them that the first life you have to change is your own.”

When Coetzee is asked about the dreams he has for his future, he says he would like to get married. He says he will have to tell his future wife and any children he may have that he is a murderer.

Now Harris Sibeko intervenes. “Listen here, chief, you must wait until a child is old enough to understand what you are telling them, otherwise the child will hate you.” Sibeko turns to the group and asks, “Do you really think we can call this young man a murderer? What do you think is a better name for him?” Then Sibeko answers his own question. “I think you should be called a military operative. Yes, that would be better.”

The group agrees with Sibeko. Then Sibeko asks Coetzee whether he receives any visitors in jail. Coetzee replies that one former prisoner comes sometimes. Sibeko is shocked. “None of your family visit you?” Coetzee replies, “No.”

The interview goes on for two hours. Finally, Olga Macingwane gets to her feet. Unusually, she is fighting with her emotions. She says, “Stefaans, when I see you, I see my sister’s son in you, and I cannot hate you.” She extends her arms. “Come here, boy,” she says in Xhosa. Coetzee walks into her embrace. “I forgive you,” Macingwane says softly. “I have heard what you said, and I forgive you.”

The Law

On that day Daniel Stephanus Coetzee became the only one of the 120 political prisoners eligible for presidential pardon to meet with his victims. The next day, November 10, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, with four new judges appointed by President Zuma, convenes. The first order of business is to hear arguments about whether or not the president should be allowed to pardon any of the political prisoners without a hearing for their victims. Zuma’s attorney argues for unfettered pardoning powers. The attorney representing one of the prisoners also argues for such powers. But an attorney for the human rights groups urges that no political criminals be pardoned without the victims of those crimes being heard. (On February 23, 2010, the constitutional court ruled in favor of the victims.)

Present in the court are some three dozen victims of political crimes involving any number of perpetrators. Several of the victims are wearing T-shirts that read, “No reconciliation without truth, reparation, redress.” Among them is Olga Macingwane.

“I forgive him, but that does not mean I pardon him,” Macingwane tells me afterward. “We are a country of laws now. We are a country who respects the voices of all people. It is up to the laws of my country to decide whether or not to pardon Stefaans.”

For too long, separation and suspicion were mandated by South African law. Now the country’s constitution upholds the dignity and equality of all people, but its power is only as potent as the people’s willingness to live by it. On January 23, 2010—as long envisioned by minister Deon Snyman—representatives of Worcester and of Zwelethemba township gather in Worcester’s Dutch Reformed Church. Across the road in a wide, shady park lies a tiny memorial to the four people killed in the 1996 bombing. The proceedings begin with a prayer. Then Macingwane and Sibeko talk about their journey to Pretoria, their meeting with Coetzee, their forgiveness of him. Restitution is discussed—a youth center and a job-creation center are two ideas. The group agrees to invite Coetzee to a church service in Worcester if the prison authorities will allow it. The date for another meeting is set. Olga Macingwane is elected to the steering committee, which will oversee the restitution process in the months and years to come.

“When I forgave Stefaans,” Macingwane says, “that label of ‘victim’ no longer had such power for me. Physically, of course, the pain will always be there. Mentally, I have at last found some peace. I am not Olga the victim. Now I am Olga. I am Mrs. Olga Macingwane.” 

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How Memory Works

This is a fascinating excerpt that points out many interesting points. My 2 favorite being 1. Our memories are tied to our emotions and 2. Our memory in influenced by many factors including bias, perceptions, and even words such as smash v. hit…
“Many people wish their memory worked like a video recording. How handy would that be? Finding your car keys would simply be a matter of zipping back to the last time you had them and hitting ‘play.’ You would never miss an appointment or forget to pay a bill. You would remember everyone’s birthday. You would ace every exam. Or so you might think. In fact, a memory like that would snare mostly useless data and mix them willy-nilly with the information you really needed. It would not let you prioritize or create the links between events that give them meaning. For the very few people who have true photographic recall – eidetic memory, in the parlance of the field – it is more burden than blessing. “For most of us, memory is not like a video recording – or a notebook, a photograph, a hard drive or any of the other common storage devices to which it has been compared. It is much more like a web of connections between people and things. Indeed, recent research has shown that some people who lose their memory also lose the ability to connect things to each other in their mind. And it is the connections that let us understand cause and effect, learn from our mistakes and anticipate the future. … “Learning and memory are not sequestered in their own storage banks but are distributed across the entire cerebral cortex. … The significance of these findings is profound. It means that memory is dispersed, forming in the regions of the brain responsible for language, vision, hearing, emotion and other functions. It means that learning and memory arise from changes in neurons as they connect to and communicate with other neurons. And it means that a small reminder can reactivate a network of neurons wired together in the course of registering an event, allowing you to experience the event anew. Remembering is reliving. … “The hippocampus [is] an essential mediator in [connecting neurons]. In a very small brain, every neuron might be connected to every other neuron. But a human brain that worked on this model would require that each of hundreds of billions of neurons be linked to every other neuron, an impossibly unwieldy configuration. The hippocampus solves this problem by serving as a kind of neural switchboard, connecting the distant cortical regions for language, vision and other abilities as synaptic networks take shape and create memories “[People with hippocampus damage] appear to have impairments that go well beyond the loss of memory creation. They also have severe difficulty imagining future events, living instead in a fragmented, disconnected reality. Recent studies show that imagining the future involves brain processes similar to, but distinct from, those involved in conjuring the past. We also tend to remember the people and events that resonate emotionally, which is why forgetting an anniversary is such an offense: it is fair evidence that the date is not as important as the ones we do remember. The discovery that memory is all about connections has revolutionary implications for education. It means that memory is integral to thought and that nothing we learn can stand in isolation; we sustain new learning only to the degree we can relate it to what we already know. … “The connections across the brain also help us conceive the future, as recent imaging studies have shown. Functional magnetic resonance imaging … shows that a mosaic of brain areas similar to those involved in memory is active when participants imagine details of hypothetical or prospective events. … “[This] can sometimes cause us problems by altering our memories instead of augmenting them. … Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus [has shown] how easy it is to create false memories of past events. In one study, participants watched a film of a car accident. Researchers asked some subjects how fast they thought the cars were going when they ‘smashed into’ each other and asked other subjects how fast the cars were going when they ‘hit’ each other. The subjects who heard the word ‘smashed’ gave significantly higher estimates of the speed. In other experiments, subjects were fed incorrect information about an accident after watching the film; they might, for instance, be asked repeatedly whether a traffic light had turned yellow before the collision when in fact the light was green. Many then remembered a yellow light that never existed – which is why eyewitness testimony after police interrogation can be so unreliable.” Author: Anthony J. Greene
Title: “Making Connections”
Publisher: Scientific American Mind
Date: July/August 2010
Pages: 22-29

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Accepting Our Belovedness

Time and time again, I have found that men have a hard time accepting love, accepting that they are beloved by God.  I urge all of us to listen to the 4 part lecture/sermons by Brennan Manning that I have posted in the past (just search for them by typing in Brennan Manning into the search area in upper right hand corner of this blog)

It is difficult to tolerate being loved because of the risk inherent in positive emotions: observations from the psychiatrist George Vaillant, who has long been the chief curator of the Harvard Study of Adult Development:

“Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the [new field of ‘positive psychology’], and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a lecture to [positive psychologist Martin] Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions – awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). ‘The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’ – which is perfectly true,’ he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

“In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs – protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections – but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

“To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his ‘prize’ [Harvard] Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. ‘On his 70th birthday,’ Vaillant said, ‘when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters – often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.’ Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. ‘George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,’ the man said, as he began to cry, ‘but I’ve never read it.’ ‘It’s very hard,’ Vaillant said, ‘for most of us to tolerate being loved.’

Author: Joshua Wolf Shenk
Title: “What Makes Us Happy?”
Publisher: The Atlantic
Date: June 2009
Pages: 47-48.

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Teaching ‘Right’

In today’s excerpt – teaching. Through many years of systematic observation of some of the very best teachers, teacher Doug Lemov has identified forty-nine key techniques that separate the very best teachers from merely good ones. One of these forty-nine techniques he has labeled “Right is Right”:

” ‘Right Is Right’ is about the difference between partially right and all-the-way
right – between pretty good and 100 percent. The job of the teacher is to set a
high standard for correctness: 100 percent. The likelihood is strong that students will stop striving when they hear the word right (or yes or some other proxy), so there’s a real risk to naming as right that which is not truly and completely right. When you sign off and tell a student she is right, she must not be betrayed into thinking she can do something that she cannot.

“Many teachers respond to almost-correct answers their students give in class
by rounding up. That is they’ll affirm the student’s answer and repeat it, adding some detail of their own to make it fully correct even though the student didn’t provide (and may not recognize) the differentiating factor. Imagine a student who’s asked at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet how the Capulets and Montagues get along. ‘They don’t like each other,’ the student might say, in an answer that most teachers would, I hope, want some elaboration on before they called it fully correct. ‘Right,’ the teacher might reply. ‘They don’t like each other, and they have been feuding for generations.’ But of course the student hadn’t included the additional detail. That’s the ’rounding up.’ Sometimes the teacher will even give the student credit for the rounding up as if the student said what he did not and what she merely wished he’d said, as in, ‘Right, what Kiley said was that they don’t like each other and have been feuding. Good work, Kiley.’ Either way, the teacher has set a low standard for correctness and explicitly told the class that they can be right even when they are not. Just as important, she has crowded out students’ own thinking, doing cognitive work that students could do themselves (e.g., ‘So, is this a recent thing? A temporary thing? Who can build on Kiley’s answer?’).

“When answers are almost correct, it’s important to tell students that they’re
almost there, that you like what they’ve done so far, that they’re closing in on
the right answer, that they’ve done some good work or made a great start. You
can repeat a student’s answer back to him so he can listen for what’s missing
and further correct – for example, ‘You said the Capulets and the Montagues
didn’t get along.’ Or you can wait or prod or encourage or cajole in other ways
to tell students what still needs doing, ask who can help get the class all the
way there until you get students all the way to a version of right that’s rigorous
enough to be college prep: ‘Kiley, you said the Capulets and the Montagues
didn’t get along. Does that really capture their relationship? Does that sound like what they’d say about each other?’

“In holding out for right, you set the expectation that the questions you ask and their answers truly matter. You show that you believe your students are capable of getting answers as right as students anywhere else. You show the difference between the facile and the scholarly. This faith in the quality of a right answersends a powerful message to your students that will guide them long after they have left your classroom.

“Over the years I’ve witnessed teachers struggle to defend right answers.
In one visit to a fifth-grade classroom, a teacher asked her students to define
peninsula. One student raised his hand and offered this definition: ‘It’s like, where the water indents into the land.’ ‘Right,’ his teacher replied, trying to reinforce participation since so few hands had gone up. Then she added, ‘Well, except that a peninsula is where land indents into water, which is a little different.’ Her reward to the student for his effort was to provide him with misinformation. A peninsula, he heard, is pretty much ‘where the water indents into the land’ but different on some arcane point he need not really recall. Meanwhile, it’s a safe bet that the students with whom he will compete for a seat in college are not learning to conflate bays and peninsulas.”

Author: Doug Lemov
Title: Teach Like a Champion
Publisher: Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint
Date: Copyright 2010 by John Wiley & Sons
Page: 35-37

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IQ Scores and Modern Minds

In today’s excerpt – IQ test results:

“Children develop only as the environment demands development. In 1981,
New Zealand-based psychologist James Flynn discovered just how profoundly true that statement is. Comparing raw IQ scores over nearly a century, Flynn saw that they kept going up: every few years, the new batch of IQ test takers seemed to be smarter than the old batch. Twelve-year-olds in the 1980s performed better than twelve-year-olds in the 1970s, who performed better than twelve-year-olds in the 1960s, and so on. This trend wasn’t limited to a certain region or culture, and the differences were not trivial. On average, IQ test takers improved over their predecessors by three points every ten years – a staggering difference of eighteen points over two generations.

“The differences were so extreme, they were hard to wrap one’s head around. Using a late-twentieth-century average score of 100, the comparative score for the year 1900 was calculated to be about 60 – leading to the truly absurd conclusion, acknowledged Flynn, ‘that a majority of our ancestors were mentally retarded.’ The so-called Flynn effect raised eyebrows throughout the world of cognitive research. Obviously, the human race had not evolved into a markedly smarter species in less than one hundred years. Something else was going on.

“For Flynn, the pivotal clue came in his discovery that the increases were
not uniform across all areas but were concentrated in certain subtests. Contemporary kids did not do any better than their ancestors when it came to
general knowledge or mathematics. But in the area of abstract reasoning, reported Flynn, there were ‘huge and embarrassing’ improvements. The further back in time he looked, the less test takers seemed comfortable with hypotheticals and intuitive problem solving. Why? Because a century ago, in a
less complicated world, there was very little familiarity with what we now
consider basic abstract concepts. ‘[The intelligence of] our ancestors in 1900
was anchored in everyday reality,’ explains Flynn. ‘We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical … Since 1950, we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot.’

“Examples of abstract notions that simply didn’t exist in the minds of our nineteenth-century ancestors include the theory of natural selection (formulated in 1864), and the concepts of control group (1875) and random sample (1877). A century ago, the scientific method itself was foreign to most
Americans. The general public had simply not yet been conditioned to think
abstractly.

“The catalyst for the dramatic IQ improvements, in other words, was not some mysterious genetic mutation or magical nutritional supplement but what Flynn described as ‘the [cultural] transition from pre-scientific to post-scientific operational thinking.’ Over the course of the twentieth century, basic principles of science slowly filtered into public consciousness, transforming the world we live in. That transition, says Flynn, ‘represents nothing less than a liberation of the human mind.’

“The scientific world-view, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial people. This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable.

“Perhaps the most striking of Flynn’s observations is this: 98 percent of IQ
test takers today score better than the average test taker in 1900. The implications of this realization are extraordinary. It means that in just one century, improvements in our social discourse and our schools have dramatically raised the measurable intelligence of almost everyone.

“So much for the idea of fixed intelligence.”

Author: David Shenk
Title: The Genius in All of Us
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2010 by David Shenk
Pages: 35-37

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Upcoming Book by Boyd: Jesus versus Jehovah

Greg Boyd explains some details of his upcoming book: Jesus versus Jehovah.  I will hold any judgments until I read it, but I agree at least with this part of his summary:

“Though he was in fact all-holy, on Calvary the Son of God identified with our sin to the point of bearing our guilt. So too, the Father is said to have afflicted his Son (Isa. 53) though in fact he merely allowed wicked powers using wicked people to crucify Jesus. When we read the Old Testament through this lens, we find God frequently identifying himself as the agent of violence, though the context makes it clear that he is merely allowing violent agents to do what they want to do. God is portrayed as doing what he actually merely allows.  There are historical and exegetic reasons for this, but the theological reason, I argue, is that God has always been a God who takes responsibility for all that he allows — even though he detests much of what he allows. This is how God bears our sin and why he takes on the semblance of a nationalistic, law-oriented warrior god.”

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Not A Copy But An Image: Thoughts from The Shack

In his amazing book: The Shack, Paul Young writes a parable with a dialogue between a guy named Mack and the Trinity: Jesus, Papa aka God, and Sarayu aka The Holy Spirit.  Here is a section that explains the Christian walk beautifully and helped me to refocus and better understand my Christian walk.

Jesus says, “Mack, just like love, submission is not something that you can do, especially not on your own.  Apart from my life inside of you, you can’t submit to Nan, or your children, or anyone else in your life, including Papa.”

“You mean…that I can’t just ask, ‘What Would Jesus Do’?”

Jesus says, “Good intentions, bad idea…my life was not meant to be an example to copy.  Being my follower is not trying to ‘be like Jesus,’ it means for your independence to be killed.  I came to give you life, real life, my life.  We will come and live our life inside of you, so that you begin to see with  our eyes, and hear with out ears, and touch with our hands, and think like we do…”

Mack says, “This must be the dying daily that Sarayu was talking about…”

“I have been crucified with Christ.  I myself no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”-Galatians 2: 20

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Don’t Worry #3: Accept the Worst Case Scenario

In this 3rd segment regarding how to stop worrying, I pull some key points from “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” by Dale Carnegie.  The 3rd key is simple: Accept the worst case scenario.

“Step 1. I analyzed the situation fearlessly and honestly and figured out what was the worst that could possibly happen as a result of this failure.”

“Step 2. After figuring out what was the worst that could possibly happen, I reconciled myself to accepting it, if necessary…After discovering the worst that could possibly happen and reconciling myself to accepting it, if necessary, an extremely important thing happened: I immediately relaxed and felt a sense of peace that I hadn’t experienced in days. ”

“Step 3. From that time on, I calmly devoted my time and energy to trying to improve upon the worst which I had already accepted mentally.”
“I probably would never have been able to do this if I had kept on worrying, because one of the worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate. When we worry, our minds jump here and there and everywhere, and we lose all power of decision. However, when we force ourselves to face the worst and accept it mentally, we then eliminate all those vague imaginings and put ourselves in a position in which we are able to concentrate on our problem.”

“The same idea was expressed by Lin Yutang in his widely read book, The Importance of Living. “True peace of mind,” said this Chinese philosopher, “comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think, it means a release of energy.” That’s it, exactly! Psychologically, it means a new release of energy! When we have accepted the worst, we have nothing more to lose. And that automatically means we have everything to gain!”

“If you have a worry problem, apply the magic formula of Willis H. Carrier by doing these three things: 1. Ask yourself,’ ‘What is the worst that can possibly happen?” 2. Prepare to accept it if you have to. 3. Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.”

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Don’t Worry #2

As I pointed out in Don’t Worry #1, living in the ‘now here’ is a powerful way to combat worry. In Dale Carnegie’s book: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, his first point is: Live today! Don’t worry/focus on yesterday or tomorrow.

“…twenty-one words from Thomas Carlyle that helped him lead a life free from worry: “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.””

“What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with ‘day-tight compartments’ as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage. Get on the bridge, and see that at least the great bulkheads are in working order. Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the Past the dead yesterdays. Touch another and shut off, with a metal curtain, the Future the unborn tomorrows. Then you are safe, safe for today! Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead. Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death. The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past. The future is today. There is no tomorrow. The day of man’s salvation is now. Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future. Shut close, then the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of life of ‘day-tight compartments.’ ”

“Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.”-Roman poet Horace.

“life ‘is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.'”

“This speech contains twenty-six words that have gone ringing down across the centuries: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Matthew 6: 34)

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Part #4: Burdens, Rest, and Meekness: Matthew and The Pursuit of God

Part 4 artificiality

Tozer points out one final source of burden: Artificiality.

“Another source of burden is artificiality. I am sure that most people live in secret fear that some day they will be careless and by chance an enemy or friend will be allowed to peep into their poor empty souls. So they are never relaxed. Bright people are tense and alert in fear that they may be trapped into saying something common or stupid. Traveled people are afraid that they may meet some Marco Polo who is able to describe some remote place where they have never been.This unnatural condition is part of our sad heritage of sin, but in our day it is aggravated by our whole way of life. Advertising is largely based upon this habit of pretense. `Courses’ are offered in this or that field of human learning frankly appealing to the victim’s desire to shine at a party. Books are sold, clothes and cosmetics are peddled, by playing continually upon this desire to appear what we are not.”

Finally to conclude our miniseries, Tozer points out the solution, once again, to our artificiality, pretense, and pride: meekness.  Only through meekness will our burdens be lifted and only then can we find rest for our souls.

“Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus’ feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ. Good keen reasoning may help slightly, but so strong is this vice that if we push it down one place it will come up somewhere else. To men and women everywhere Jesus says, `Come unto me, and I will give you rest.’ The rest He offers is the rest of meekness, the blessed relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to pretend. It will take some courage at first, but the needed grace will come as we learn that we are sharing this new and easy yoke with the strong Son of God Himself. He calls it `my yoke,’ and He walks at one end while we walk at the other.”

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Part #3: Burdens, Rest, and Meekness: Matthew and The Pursuit of God

Part 3  Pretense and Little Children

Tozer proceeds to share another of our burdens: Pretense.

“Then also he will get deliverance from the burden of pretense. By this I mean not hypocrisy, but the common human desire to put the best foot forward and hide from the world our real inward poverty. For sin has played many evil tricks upon us, and one has been the infusing into us a false sense of shame. There is hardly a man or woman who dares to be just what he or she is without doctoring up the impression. The fear of being found out gnaws like rodents within their hearts. The man of culture is haunted by the fear that he will some day come upon a man more cultured than himself. The learned man fears to meet a man more learned than he. The rich man sweats under the fear that his clothes or his car or his house will sometime be made to look cheap by comparison with those of another rich man. So-called `society’ runs by a motivation not higher than this, and the poorer classes on their level are little better.”

Tozer then points the solution to our pretense.  The way of the child.

“Let no one smile this off. These burdens are real, and little by little they kill the victims of this evil and unnatural way of life. And the psychology created by years of this kind of thing makes true meekness seem as unreal as a dream, as aloof as a star. To all the victims of the gnawing disease Jesus says, `Ye must become as little children.’ For little children do not compare; they receive direct enjoyment from what they have without relating it to something else or someone else. Only as they get older and sin begins to stir within their hearts do jealousy and envy appear. Then they are unable to enjoy what they have if someone else has something larger or better. At that early age does the galling burden come down upon their tender souls, and it never leaves them till Jesus sets them free.”

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Part #2: Burdens, Rest, and Meekness: Matthew and The Pursuit of God

Part 2 Pride and Meekness

The first burden that A.W. Tozer discusses in Chapter 9 of The Pursuit of God is PRIDE.

“Let us examine our burden. It is altogether an interior one. It attacks the heart and the mind and reaches the body only from within. First, there is the burden of pride. The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The heart’s fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Continue this fight through the years and the burden will become intolerable. Yet the sons of earth are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them.”

Tozer proceeds to point out the link between Jesus wisdom in Matthew 5:5 regarding the meek, and His ability to lighten our burdens (Matthew 11:28-30)

“Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to His rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort. He develops toward himself a kindly sense of humor and learns to say, `Oh, so you have been overlooked? They have placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to care what men think.’

The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is in the sight of God of more importance than angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto…As he walks on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him. The old struggle to defend himself is over. He has found the peace which meekness brings.”

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What if…we have it all wrong? What if there is…

What if….we have it all wrong? What if there is a God that loves and adores YOU? What if there are angels? What if there is a heaven?  What if there is a celebration filled with dancing, rejoicing, singing in heaven?  What if there is a celebration right NOW over YOU?

Sally Beth Roe, a character in Piercing the Darkness by Frank Peretti, becomes a Christian, but Peretti provides us with a glimpse of what is occurring in heaven during the very moment that Sally Roe becomes a Christian.  It is a remarkable moment of angels celebrating and the lamb of God embracing her.  We have NO idea.

“Above, as if another sun had just risen, the darkness opened, and pure, white rays broke through the treetops, flooding Sally Beth Roe with a heavenly light, shining through to her heart, her innermost spirit, obscuring her form with a blinding fire of holiness.  Slowly, without sensation, without sound, she settled forward, her face to the ground, her spirit awash with the presence of God…All around her, like spokes of a wondrous wheel, like beams of light emanating from a sun, angelic blades lay flat upon the ground, their tips turned toward her, their handles extending outward, held in the strong fists of hundreds of noble warriors who knelt in perfect, concentric circles of glory, light, and worship, their heads to the ground, their wings stretching skyward like a flourishing, animated garden of flames.  They were silent, their hearts filled with holy dread…As in countless times past, in countless places, with marvelous, inscrutable wonder, the Lamb of God stood among them, the Word of God, and more:  the final Word, the end of all discussion and challenge, the Creator and the Truth that holds all creation together–most wondrous of all, and most inscrutable of all, the Savior, a title the angels would always behold and marvel about, but which only mankind could know and understand.  He had come to be the Savior of this woman.  He knew her by name; and speaking her name, He touched her.  And her sins were gone…”-pg 321, Piercing the Darkness by Peretti

Edwin Abbot in his book Flatland shares with us, through parable, mathematics, and physics, the very real possibility of dimensions and realities so very close to us, but we remain unaware of them.  What if string theory is true?  What if there are dimensions just beyond our reach?  What if God and the heavenly realm is all around us, surrounding us, embracing us?

What would it be like to get a glimpse into heaven uninhibited, over joyed, overwhelmed in celebration?  Here is a brief video of a wedding that brought laughter and joy to my heart as I imagined….dancing and rejoicing in heaven over US!

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Part #1: Burdens, Rest, and Meekness: Matthew 5 and Chapter 9 of The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Matt.5:5a

I started the New Year resolved to read through the Bible (again).  As I read Matthew chapter 5, I was struck (again and again) by its beauty and transforming power.  On the same day, I just happen to pick up A.W. Tozer’s book: The Pursuit of God that I have been reading for months and turn to chapter 9 which starts with a discussion of the beginning of Matthew chapter 5–‘coincidence’? Unlikely.

Tozer points out that most of what constitutes evil, pain, and suffering in our world comes from you know who….you and me!

“In the world of men we find nothing approaching the virtues of which Jesus spoke in the opening words of the famous Sermon on the Mount. Instead of poverty of spirit we find the rankest kind of pride; instead of mourners we find pleasure seekers; instead of meekness, arrogance; instead of hunger after righteousness we hear men saying, `I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing’; instead of mercy we find cruelty; instead of purity of heart, corrupt imaginings; instead of peacemakers we find men quarrelsome and resentful; instead of rejoicing in mistreatment we find them fighting back with every weapon at their command…these are the evils which make life the bitter struggle it is for all of us. All our heartaches and a great many of our physical ills spring directly out of our sins. Pride, arrogance, resentfulness, evil imaginings, malice, greed: these are the sources of more human pain than all the diseases that ever afflicted mortal flesh.”

His words are oxygen to a patient gasping for air.  Christ alone knows how to ease our suffering, our pain, our burdens…

“Into a world like this the sound of Jesus’ words comes wonderful and strange, a visitation from above. It is well that He spoke, for no one else could have done it as well; and it is good that we listen. His words are the essence of truth. He is not offering an opinion; Jesus never uttered opinions. He never guessed; He knew, and He knows.”

“`Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ (Mat 11:28-30) Here we have two things standing in contrast to each other, a burden and a rest. The burden is not a local one, peculiar to those first hearers, but one which is borne by the whole human race. It consists not of political oppression or poverty or hard work. It is far deeper than that. It is felt by the rich as well as the poor for it is something from which wealth and idleness can never deliver us. The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing. The word Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do. His own meekness, that is the rest.”

In coming posts we will examine our burdens…

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New Year’s Quiet Time

Any part of a New Year would not be complete without the challenge and encouragement to refocus on what is important.  Find a devotional (suggestions below) and walk deeper with God this year.  2 key parts to any quiet time are prayer and devotional reading.  Please click on the links here to review:

1. How to Pray

2. Devotionals

As for my New Year’s Devotional, I will be using a free Bible application on my droid phone that gives you the readings for each day so you can read through the Bible in a year.  I have thankfully read through the Bible in a year several times, and it has always been a blessing.  However, there are those dry spells during which I find myself struggling to accomplish my goal.  Don’t give up! And if you have any questions about what you are reading along the way please don’t hesitate to ask us about them at uberlumen or uberlumen@uberlumen.com

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The Christmas Story: Then and Now Luke 2:1-20

Now:

  • Jesus birth was a late night, imminent, delivery
  • Joseph and Mary had a hard time finding a place
  • Jesus was born in a ‘manger’
  • There was no room at the ‘inn’

Then:

  • Joseph and Mary were not in a rush, and there was no late night, emergent delivery.
  • Joseph was of the royal line of David (in fact, Bethlehem was known as ‘the city of David’).  Joseph’s arrival would be welcomed and he would have been shown the respect of someone from the royal line of David.  Mary had relatives in a neighboring town, and in the middle eastern culture at the time, a pregnant women would have been shown respect and utmost care.  Mary would have been welcomed with open arms.
  • Jesus was born in a family room of a friend or relative’s home.  A manger was a cut out in the floor of the family room.  In the Middle East in the 1st century, the home was structured in such a way that the animals were placed inside the home at night to provide warmth and protect them from robbers.  There were several mangers in the family room for the animals.  Jesus would have been wrapped in warm clothes and placed in comfort in a manger in the family room of the home.
  • The Greek word for ‘inn’ (katalyma) used by Luke was also used by him in Luke 22:10-12 and was translated more accurately there as ‘guest room’.  If Luke meant a commercial inn or hotel, he would have used the Greek word: pandocheion.  Many families would have a main living area (with a manger) and a guest room attached.  The attached guest room was occupied to the home of the family that Joseph and Mary were staying with so that is what is meant by ‘no room in the guest room’ in the Biblical text.

reference: Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey

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Johnny the Bagger

We CAN make a difference every moment, every day.  God help us to stop and listen for those moments in every day life that we can love and encourage those around us.

Johnny is a grocery store bagger who has Down syndrome. He heard from one of the grocery store people about how people can make a difference but he thought he couldn’t do anything special for the customers because he was just a bagger. But then he had an idea: ‘he decided that every night when he came home from work, he would find a ‘thought for the day’ for his next shift. It would be something positive, some reminder of how good it was to be alive, or how much people matter, or how many gifts we are surrounded by. If he couldn’tfind one, he would make one up. Every night his dad would help him enter the saying six times on a page on the computer; then Johnny would print fifty pages. He would take out a pair of scissors and carefully cut three hundred copies and sign every one. Johnny put the stack of pages next to him while he worked. Each time he finished bagging someone’s groceries, he would put his saying on top of the last bag. Then he would stop what he was doing, look the person straight in the eye, and say, ‘I’ve put a great saying in your bag. I hope it helps you have a good day. Thanks for coming here.’ A month later, the store manager found that the line at Johnny’s checkout was three times longer than anyone else’s. It went all the way down the frozen food aisle. The manager got on the loudspeaker to get more checkout lines open, but he couldn’t get any of the customers to move. They said, ‘That’s okay. We’ll wait. We want to be in Johnny’s line.’ One woman came up to him and grabbed his hand, saying, ‘I used to shop in your store once a week. Now I come in every time I go by–I want to get Johnny’s thought for the day.’ Johnny is doing more than filling bags with groceries; he is filling lives with hope.-excerpt from ‘When the game is over it all goes back in the box’ by John Ortberg

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The Power of Forgiveness: Matthew 18

I know that I am getting a nudge to post when I am reading a chapter about forgiveness and I also happen to start listening to a podcast on forgiveness. These notes are a summary of a chapter on forgiveness in “You Were Born for This” by Bruce Wilkinson (Chapter 12: The Forgiveness Key), and the podcast is a sermon done by Mike Erre.  As always, share your thoughts with us.

Forgiveness is VERY important to God and for us to embrace.

There is only ONE thing that we are called to do in the entire Lord’s Prayer:  “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors…”-Matthew 6:12

God, as represented by the King in Matthew 18, gets angry with those He has forgiven of an payable debt refuse to forgive others of a very small debt:

“…so My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trepasses…”-Matthew 18:35 (see also Matthew 6:14-15)

What will God do to us if we don’t forgive?  He will ‘hand us over to the torturers’ (Matt 18:34).  What?! What does this mean?!  It means that God turns His people who refuse to forgive others over to the painful consequences of their own unforgiveness until the person, from their heart, forgives others their trespasses (debts).  We will torment OURSELVES until we open our hearts and forgive.

3 key points to remember:

  • Jesus: “Jesus forgave you.  You can choose to forgive others.”
  • Justice: “Vengeance belongs to God, not to you or me.”
  • Jailer: “You are your own jailer.  Your torment won’t end until you forgive.  Then it will end immediately.  You will be free. And that is what God wants for you.”

2 gifts occur when we forgive:

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Emotions

“Emotions are the window to reality.”  Really? I have not bought into that.  Why? Probably because I was raised to be out of touch with my emotions.  I strive at being non-emotive.   But it turns out that emotions and their physiological effects play a key part in our decision making.

Why do police departments generally do not allow their officers to participate in high speed chases?  What is the cause of most medical errors? Answer: Emotions.  Really? Yes.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink,  Gladwell points out that there is a physiological response to stress/fear/anger/ie our emotions.  One of the findings reported by a police officer who has studied police shooting incidents has found that when we are stressed and our heart rate goes about 145 beats per minute we start to lose our ability to reason, think clearly, etc.  There is a sweet spot to stress when our heart rate is between 110-145 our body responds by making our ability to think clearly sharper in this heart rate range.  Some police departments have banned high speed car chases for this very reason.  They have found that the police in a high speed chase are so stressed that they will often respond by being overly aggressive at the time of arrest.

Dr. Groopman in How Doctors Think points out that most medical errors are related to our emotions…

“But what I and my colleagues rarely recognized, and what physicians still rarely discussed as medical students, interns, residents, and indeed throughout their professional lives, is how other emotions influence a doctor’s perceptions and judgments, his actions and reactions. I long believed that the errors we made in medicine were largely technical ones—prescribing the wrong dose of a drug, transfusing a unit of blood matched for another person, mislabeling an x-ray of an arm as “right” instead of “left.” But as a growing body of research shows, technical errors account for only a small fraction of our incorrect diagnoses and treatments. Most errors are mistakes in thinking. And part of what causes these cognitive errors is our inner feelings, feelings we do not readily admit to and often don’t even recognize.”