The Hide of a Rhinoceros

I've been thinking about hurt feelings lately. Mainly because it was my feelings that were hurt. So here's what I've been wondering about.

There's this statement about ministers that they need to have the hide of a rhinoceros and the heart of a child. I don't know how true that is. It sounds pithy. And there's a good point behind it: you need to have a big heart and a thick skin. Which, when you think about it, the two are sort of in tension. Because when you open yourself up to care about other people -- whether in ministry, or just in general -- you become more sensitive to their likes & dislikes. And in being more sensitive to others, you tend to also become more sensitive about your own likes & dislikes. And especially when certain someones jump all over your dislikes -- it's difficult not to be offended.

So is the same true about developing a thick skin? In making you less susceptible to pain, does it also make you less loving in terms of sensing other people's pain? Questions I'm wondering about...

Because it is a virtue to me to not become irritable. I admire people who can step above the drama of feeling slighted. And I have a difficult time being with people who never pass up an opportunity to get upset. From Day 6 of The Love Dare:

To be irritable means "to be near the point of a knife." Not far from being poked. People who are irritable are locked, loaded, and ready to overreact.

If you're like me, you can instantly think of a handful of people who fit the profile. And they're probably difficult to get along with, or to make happy. And you don't wanna be like those people.

Until you realize that the things that offend them are probably the same kinds of things that get you up in arms. Am I right?

But that whole "hide of a rhinoceros" idea -- that doesn't mean that you're impervious. It does not mean that you have impregnable armor on. It just means your skin is thicker. So perhaps getting irritated isn't the same as being irritable. Right?

But how do you know the difference?

The one thing that comes to mind is what made Jesus irritated after he'd had his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He entered into the Temple, and was disgusted with the way commerce was happening there. And so he whipped into action. I don't believe I'm prepared to say that Jesus was irritable. I'm not sure anyone could say that. But he did get irritated.

And why? Was it becomes someone had stepped on his toes? Or become the final straw on the camel's back? No. It was because what broke the heart of God broke Jesus' heart. What was happening there violated God's values. It was wrong, and it deserved that response.

There's a sign at the athletic facility for the University of Alabama football players that Saban has the players look at & touch/tap before they enter the practice field. It says, "Out of myself and into the team." That is, that the team's ambitions, goals, and values are more important than any one person's ambitions, goals, and values. Or, to put it another way, "He must become greater; I must become less." (John 3:30) The things that violate God's values deserve a tough response. And the more that it is those kinds of things that upset us, rather than our own selfish pet peeves, I'd say that the more we can measure our spiritual growth.

I'm trying to learn that getting irritated does not necessarily mean I or anyone else is irritable. And I'm trying to discern the difference between the two. But sometimes I wonder if that requires more sober-minded thinking than I am even capable of.

Pet Peeves

This will be short & sweet, but here's a thought -- how selfish are pet peeves? You know: those social behaviors that there aren't written down rules for that make you flip out. I'm trying to cut down on mine.

Why? Because it's hard enough for people to keep up with Scripture and the laws of the land. We also expect people to hold to some arbitrary code of morality of our own making that others must observe in our presence at all times? Who do we think we are? Isn't that the height of arrogance?

I suppose these sentiments are an open invitation for comments from friends that they may know will crawl under my skin to their own amusement. But whatever. I could stand to work on patience. We all could. I dare you to dump some of your pet peeves, and see if you don't become a more welcoming, loving person in the process.

Lamenting the 21st Century 5-star Diva

For those of you who enjoy my sporadic rantings and ravings, I feel guilty for depriving you. It may sound like a pathetic excuse, but sometimes I begin to feel like there is too much girth of opinion and writing on the web. And, when you can probably find half a dozen like it if you look hard enough, what does my opinion really mean? With so much noise, what is one more yell into the echo-chamber?

Anyway, I waited long enough & I don't think there's an opinion out there like this one. It's another sports blog. I know I get sports heavy when I write. I apologize. But anyway, for those of you who like to read my words, here are a few more...

Lamenting the 21st Century 5-Star Diva

Social Fruitflies

I had to chuckle at the sight of today's UrbanDictionary.com Word of the Day:

Social Fruitfly
Like a social butterfly, without any charm or beauty. An unwanted pest.

It brought to mind an old Randy Harris lesson. One of his points is that every church has a social fruitfly. He even cracked wise and said, "Now some of you think I'm lying, thinking, 'That's not true!... Some church is missing their's because we've got TWO!'" His point was that it takes a whole church to love on people like this. Not just one person can handle the job. Maybe Sister Always-Wears-Purple can give her a phone call & chat -- JUST for 15 minutes, because you can only take a Social Fruitfly in doses. And perhaps Brother Always-Talks-Football can make sure that the Social Fruitfly feels welcome the next time a group is getting together to catch a movie. Partly because Brother Always-Talks-Football would really do well to branch out in terms of thinking about what's important.

Everyone takes their turn. Nobody feels over-burdened. Everybody dispenses a little bit of the grace that they themselves have already received.

Jesus loved the least of these. The Social Fruitflies -- they appear to have been real comfortable around Him. He became known for the love that he showed them. And then Jesus made the pivot to say, "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

I think that includes the Social Fruitflies.

Annointing a Saint

Don't call it a comeback. Call it a Revival.

Wrote a few words about the passing of a good athlete & great person over at a blog I do with a buddy that we call "Saints, Sinners, and Sports." You should check it out.

"Of Sinners & Saints"

'Nobody's Perfect'

No, I will not be exegeting the hit song by Billy Ray Cyrus' daughter.

They say that sports is a microcosm of life. That being the case, Armando Galarraga taught the world how life is supposed to be lived: with a smile on your face, and with no malice in your heart.

In case you're not a baseball fan, I should help you catch up. On Wednesday night, the young Galarraga was on the verge of throwing a perfect game. It's so rare that it's only happened 20 times in Major League Baseball history. What's a perfect game? That's where a pitcher retires all 27 batters he faces without allowing any walks, hits, hit batsmen, or errors. That last one is critical, because it means your team-mates have to be perfect, too. And as we learned tonight, so do the umpires.

Let's pick it up in the 9th inning. Galarraga had faced 24 batters, and none of them had reached first base. The first batter of the 9th inning steps in, launches a rocket, and Armando got a little help from his friends with an incredible catch by Austin Jackson. It was so stunning that Armando himself unleashed a grin at how good his fortune was that Jackson hauled in that fly ball. 2 outs away.

After a groundball out to shortstop, only one out separated Galarraga from a perfect game. What happened next, as FDR once said, will go down in infamy.

You just have to watch for yourself.




The first base umpire blew the call. He admitted it himself. [ESPN]

"It was the biggest call of my career, and I kicked the [stuff] out of it," Jim Joyce said, looking and sounding distraught as he paced in the umpires' locker room. "I just cost that kid a perfect game."

"I thought he beat the throw. I was convinced he beat the throw, until I saw the replay."

Never has wrong been so unanimously wrong.

And as far as we know, nothing can be done about it. Major League Baseball's instant replay rules didn't allow that play to be reviewed. So it stood. Perhaps the Commissioner could make a special ruling, but that would be unprecedented.

A perfect game -- baseball immortality -- robbed by the proverbial blind ump. It's the stuff of a Classic Greek tragedy.

But that's not the end of the story.

Sports and social media went into a firestorm as the game ended. Twitter was all aflutter. Every single baseball analyst was getting their words in. Even former sportscasters that now host shows on cable news networks. The consensus? "This was wrong!" You can probably identify with it: an overwhelming injustice was done. I think it's fair to say that our nation hasn't seen anyone upstage a big moment like this ever since Kanye West did the deed to Taylor Swift. It's that big.

And if you still don't quite get it, maybe this will help. There are scant few things in life that you can point at & not criticize. Especially in your own life. How many things have you ever completed in your life that you can look back upon & call it perfect?? Unless you're one of those people who grew up never missing a day of class in school, and never had so much as even an A-, and never so much as saw a pimple when you looked in the mirror, you've never been perfect. We've all had blemishes; we've all had ink blots on our record at one point or another.

Which is what makes the luster of a perfect game all the more special & sacred. For ONE day -- for one brief moment in time -- a pitcher can point to that and say, "That was perfect."

Until that moment is robbed from you by someone else's imperfection.

And then, in the locker-room after the game, with more maturity than anyone else in the world demonstrated on Twitter, on the diamond, in the press box, or anywhere else, Armando Galarraga shrugged off the bad call by saying, "Nobody's perfect." I'm not sure how you muster the will to say those words. But he did. Twice. [MLB]

Galarraga said he gave Joyce a hug when Joyce apologized to him after the game.

"He really feels bad," Galarraga said. "He probably feels more bad than me. Nobody is perfect. I give a lot of credit to that guy. That (an apology) doesn't happen. He apologized. He feels really bad. Nobody is perfect. What am I gonna do? His body language said more than a lot of words. His eyes were watery, he didn't have too say much. His body language said a lot."

And here's where the game being a microcosm of life pivots from mere entertainment to teach us something about our existence. Armando's right. Nobody is perfect. Life is not fair. It is one of the more difficult discoveries of life when you begin to realize this fact yourself. And I'm not just talking about the cruel twists of fate where the ball doesn't bounce your way. It's especially heart-breaking when people let you down. And they're going to. 'Cause nobody's perfect.

And how we deal with that fact determines in large part how we deal with life going forward. It is perhaps the definitive hallmark of maturity for one to be able to be able to react in a positive way to other people when they deliver to you a negative experience. Extending mercy when outrage feels better, or even right. To give your wife a hug when she locks her keys in the car for the third time this year. Or to give your husband a kiss when he gets lost despite the presence of a Rand McNally map, an iPhone, and a Garmin. Or cracking a wry smile on the field, and effectively shrugging your shoulders in the locker room, when an umpire blows your perfect game.

Armando Galarraga's reaction begs me the question, and I pass it along to you as well: am I that sort of person? Or am I way more impatient?

I want to be like Armando. I want to be the kind of person that gives people permission to be human. I want to be able to not break bruised reeds or not snuff out smoldering wicks (Is. 42:3). But there are far too many moments where I'm not.

I wish I had a visual reminder. I think that would help. If I had an image that stood before me day after day that would remind me for all time that nobody's perfect. Because no matter how much I look in the mirror, Satan always seems up to the challenge to twist my thinking.

I think I have just such an image in mind. A poster. A wide-lense photograph from down the first baseline, back in the stands behind home plate. It would be of the moment right after Galarraga touched first base with his right foot. He's starting to lift his arms in triumph & he's looking up at the umpire. And Jim Joyce is emphatically extending his arms to make his infamous, heart-breaking call. And in true Successories style, this poster would have a caption.

I think you know what it would say.

When Pop-Culture Meets Epistemology

WARNING: spoilers lie ahead. If you aren't caught up on all the latest episodes of LOST, save this to read later

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A great little piece of pop-culture is set to expire in just over a week. The ABC television series "LOST" comes to a close on May 23rd when it airs it's 2-and-a-half-hour finale.

Part of the show's great appeal has been how difficult it is to figure out what exactly is going on. If you don't watch the show, that might seem strange. And it is. The show turns you upside down so many times that you can scarcely decide which way is actually up. It is the epitome of the phrase coined by Winston Churchill, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Just when you think you have figured out what is going on, the show peels back another layer of the onion to reveal a perspective you haven't even been aware of before.

Take the notion of figuring out what the island is. There are at least a half-dozen theories. The island is Atlantis. The island is the Garden of Eden. Perhaps the island is a just a place for the cursed -- a place where people are tortured and ultimately sentenced to die. And then there are island mythologies that have been presented to the viewers this season. Jacob, a very influential character, shows another character a bottle of wine, and suggests that the island is the cork that keeps the contents of the bottle from spilling out & ruining the rest of the world. And now, more recently, we were introduced to Jacob's mother. She shows her sons a sinkhole that a small stream empties into & that has an unearthly golden glow emanating out of it. Jacob's mother then explains that this is the light of the world, and that if it goes out on the island it goes out everywhere else in the world.

If you don't watch the show, and you've stayed with me this far, God bless you. Because you're probably thinking what I'm thinking, "This is just some murky bologna." That's exactly what it is. But it all serves to cause you to question how you know what it is you think you know -- the question of epistemology. A point that Entertainment Weekly's requisite LOST writer "Doc" Jensen touched on this week:

To behold ("the golden light" from the sinkhole) is to take a metaphysical Rorschach text. I might see God and a call to worship. Someone else might see science and a call to investigate. Someone else might see a practical joke and start looking around for Ashton Kutcher. I suspect Lost would say that no single interpretation is correct; that those who insist on a single interpretation couldn’t be more incorrect; that the history of human catastrophe on The Island is comprised of eras of dogmatic, abusive interpretation run amok.

Terrifying thought, isn't it?

And then you take a glimpse at the real world, and real human history. Where there were things like the Aryan supremacy movement in 1930's Germany (partly a result of faith in Darwin's "survival of the fittest" thinking), and The Crusades (whose effects echo down through the centuries all the way to today's "War on Terror"). "Dogmatic, abusivve interpretation run amok" can explain a lot of sad parts of our history.

It's almost enough to make you want to swear off taking a stand on anything, which is an error of another kind. Pluralism reigns. Which "Doc" Jensen goes on to address, thinking about what is the message of LOST:

It could be that LOST is philosophically relativistic and religiously pluralistic — but given everything else we've seen on the show, I think what's more likely is that Lost just doesn't trust human beings enough to know "the right answer." We are too flawed, too damaged, too biased, too selfish, too incapable, too limited, too mortal, just plain too much of this world to be able to really and fully know what this world is really all about. To paraphrase Mother: All our answers will only lead to more questions. It's an infinite progression into infinite regression — "turtles all the way down" cubed, to use a phrase that I'm too stupid and tired and lazy to explain, but feel free to look it up. I don't think LOST is saying to stop pursuing truth. Not at all. I think it's more concerned with how we conduct our search and how we can labor with our neighbor in their search.

It all brings to mind the old parable about seeking truth. Say you blind-folded 4 men, and had them feel out an elephant. What would they say they found? One man might discover the tail, and declare that it is a rope. Another man might discover the trunk, and call what he found a huge snake. Another man might feel out the tusks, and say he discovered a spiny beast with spears protruding out of it. And another might just feel up the side of the elephant, and say that it is like a great wall. The point being that we’re all essentially half-blind creatures (at best) with very limited perspectives. Paul might say, “we see as through a mirror dimly.”

Which is very difficult for an Evangelical like me. Because while I believe that the text I’m handling is inerrant, I can’t really believe in my ability to meet it all out infallibly. I'm only human.

So, that being the case, I'm going to need grace for the errors I will inevitably make.

And that being the case, I probably oughta have grace with others on theological errors they may happen to make. Because if we want forgiveness, we have to forgive.

Ultimately, the point is humility. Because while we've all cobbled together a set of beliefs about what our world is & where its going, we'd be hard-pressed to claim full knowledge & insight into the goings-on around us. To have enough humility to maintain an open mind. To not be closed off to other possibilities when the next layer of the onion is peeled back before us.

Such a conclusion seems to clash with the idea of "boldness," something that the book of Acts speaks a lot about. Until next time...