Daily pages of reflection...for knowledge, understanding, to wisdom
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

Dependency

August 3, 2017
Year 2, Day 215 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Benedetto Luti, 1715-20

There is too little understanding of the meaning of human dependency.  It ought to be a part of our education to learn the meaning and discover how to gain the best results of every person’s dependency on others.  In America there is such a high opinion of individuality and spunk in persons that we may miss the reality that human individuality is enhanced by appropriate dependency.  Rightly understood, dependency contributes to maturity, a high value in Christianity as well as in general society – even though there is considerably more to Christian maturity than is commonly perceived in nature’s maturity.  I began life as a fetus dependent upon mother.  In my birth there was evidence of the effects of the… Read more

Society And Work

August 2, 2017
Year 2, Day 214 | No Comments

Some of my professional life has been taken up as a consultant to various management persons, companies, churches, missions, even modest companies like a local tire sales business, and large ones like Habitat for Humanity, IBM, Federal Agencies, and others, including Federal agencies.  In this concluding period of my life, I feel that most of these entities knew what they ought to do before I arrived, but they did not put into action what they knew.  They either needed a probe to go forward, or someone to resist.  Studies show that workers do not do as well as they feel they ought to do.  Their supervisors are in agreement with them.  Why do people tend to do less than they… Read more

Wholeness

August 1, 2017
Year 2, Day 213 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Benedetto Luti, 1715-20

I have shared meal invitations with many persons who have various interesting, perhaps harmless, habits that are intriguing.  When he was small, one of my grandsons was fearful that one food would run into another.  He would make a funny little sound if he believed the egg yolk was about to touch the potatoes.  I have observed several persons who would eat each item of the meal separately from virtually every other item.  The pancakes were eaten separately from the eggs, the bacon from the hash browns, and the toast only with the coffee.  This last was the only fellowship of the parts – until ingested – where they do mix. Some persons live their lives in parts.  They are… Read more

Distortion

July 31, 2017
Year 2, Day 212 | No Comments
Section of The Crucifixion, Pedro Orrente, ca. 1625–30

Always pressing mankind, from variant sources, are odd influences in personal and social lives that sometimes work for good and sometimes for ill, sometimes for virtue and sometimes for carnality, sometimes to lift and sometimes to drag down.  They may be continued for years to advantage or loss for generations.  The following are a few observations to which we ought to give attention for continuity. GENDER – My concern here relates to males.  Leadership Quarterly, in 2011, included a squib about men in current context, with emphasis on the younger generation.  We are told that the shift in interest is from more to different.  I may not want a good thing, but a different thing.  I may even want a… Read more

Social Parenting

July 30, 2017
Year 2, Day 211 | No Comments
Section of The Infant Jesus and St. John the Baptist, Guido Reni, n.d.

This date is reserved in my memory and prayer for family, because it is the birth date of my mother, born in 1897, and deceased in 1993.  Her formal education was limited, but what she had was practical, and helped carry her through difficult years.  She had three small children, less than two years of age when her husband returned from work, laid off until he could recover from tuberculosis.  My twin sisters were less than six months old, born sixteen months after me.  My father returned to his mother, who gave of herself and what money she had, to help him regain his health.  She sat by his bed as he drew his last breath.  She also had his… Read more

Teaching/Preaching

July 29, 2017
Year 2, Day 210 | No Comments
Section of Noli me Tangere by Hans Holbein the Younger

In many areas of life we find terms reflecting differences in the main thrust of the genus with which we are working.  The accents in the two (or more) sub-divisions are sufficiently different in presuppositions that they are divided and are made to stand on their own.  They are so similar that some persons, even well trained in fields of communication and rhetoric are ill furnished with the differences.   Students in a basic speech course in college may never hear about the truly vital differences in communications as they relate to various fields.  This becomes one of the major reasons for Christian higher education to become an option of choice from public or secular education.  I remember the surprise of… Read more

Children

July 28, 2017
Year 2, Day 209 | No Comments
Section of The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

I am much taken by the stories of parents and their children.  Those stories revealing good and ill, tell me about the management of their lives, incorporating the love/hate factors, the discipline/planning, the hopes/dreams, the health/illness, the folly/maturity, the experience/education, and the faith/values. From a Hillsdale College publication I read a story of Calvin Coolidge, and the death of his son, Calvin, Jr.  Coolidge went into the White House in the same year I was born, so accounting for my initial interest (much later, of course).  He would most likely have been elected for another term had he chosen to run in 1928.  He had succeeded to the presidency on the untimely death of Warren Harding, whose administration had been… Read more

Transient

July 27, 2017
Year 2, Day 208 | No Comments
Section of Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo, 1508-1512

An important test for values and their meaning to life and mankind rests in their lasting quality.  If lastingness is reduced for some reason, we look for the problem and amend our emphasis related to factors of concern.  We know, for example, that solidarity of family life is important to a balanced and improving society.  When the family is violated by infidelity, or by some diminishing law, or by invasion of ideas unsuited to the health of the family as an entity (institution) given of God, the society will suffer as well as the family.  The institutional church was born at Pentecost, to make transition from a tribal/family representation, to a world/family representation.  Even Jesus noted that Israel’s evangelism (proselyting)… Read more

Take Heart

July 26, 2017
Year 2, Day 207 | No Comments
Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

During the first decade of the new century, the 21st, the world has gone from a high level of fiscal development to a fiscal recession that challenges the Great Depression of the 1930s for economic woes and imbalance.  Daily we are informed about the possibility of nations (Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy) becoming bankrupt.  The markets of Wall Street, and those of nations around the world, fluctuate wildly from day to day.   Advances and declines are numbered in the thousands of points (dollars) and reported daily.  Uncertainty, with all its shadows, becomes the factor that spooks investors.  We discover that the negatives are poor guides for persons or societies in action.  Uncertainty is a serious irritant, which ought to call us… Read more

Joying

July 25, 2017
Year 2, Day 206 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Adulteress, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Workshop, ca. 1545–50

Maturing persons learn how to take control of their lives – and the sooner the better, if done rightly.  This process ought to be a conscious practice early in one’s education that begins with parental discipline – when the person is idealistic (not yet jaded by the marginal conducts found in society); when one looks to the future (so imagines what life can and ought to be, and believing rightly that ol’ folks are rather ‘sot’ in their ways); when one is more likely to adjust to change, even welcome it, having a sense that there may well be something different and better from what is known and followed at the moment); and, with energy to make adaptations and take… Read more

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