DaddyRoBlog

Turning A Little Into A Lot

How do you start with a little and get a lot?

It seems to me that’s a question well worth asking. If you are a parent, for instance, and you notice in your child a behavior that you’d like to see more of, how do you go about increasing the prevalence of that behavior in your child’s life? Or if in business you are a manager or part of a team, and you see in someone an attitude that you would like to see throughout your company or endeavor, how do you go about multiplying it? Or if you are a teacher, how do you go about starting with a little bit of knowledge in your students and then multiply it?

In the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand, this is precisely what Jesus does: he starts with a little, and he ends up with a lot. He seems to have a very deliberate strategy for doing so, and it’s one that you and I can emulate.

First, it seems to me that Jesus was clear about what it was he wanted to increase. More important to him than increasing the amount of bread and the fish was multiplying things like sharing,  helping, and having faith.

Being clear about we want to see increase is where we need to start as well. We also need to be clear about what values, attitudes, and behaviors we want to see multiplied. So, in a company I’ll want to determine what really is most important . Is it maximizing profit or customer service? And while an argument can be made that in the long run the two are the same thing, I can pretty much guarantee you that in the short term the two will be in direct conflict and that hard choices will have to be made. Which is the behavior that you’d really like to see multiplied throughout your organization?

As a teacher, do you teach to the SoLs (Standards of Learning), or to broader principles, or towards a love of learning itself? How you answer that question will determine what will be multiplied in and out of your classroom, and it will lead to very different approaches to teaching itself.

Or as a parent, what are the three to five values that you want to see increase in your children so that they become their character? In fact, if you are a parent, one of the things I hope you’ll do is sit down with your spouse, and with great clarity and intentionality, answer that question. What will those values be? Faith? Kindness? Respect? Compassion? Hard work? Because if we are not clear about this, then the world around us will by default select the behaviors, attitudes, and values it wants to increase –and we may not be very happy at all with the result.

Bayou Bride

  That's the name of the daylily pictured above.  Though it seems to be a slow grower, the blooms are  big and pretty.  The black anthers of the stamen against the golden throat are particularly striking.  And this one really does seem to rebloom; with the first round of blooms finished, it is now developing a new scape.

Perception

It has been said that we see the world not as it is, but as we are.  I tend to think that is right. Perhaps that explains why when I look at this sunflower, it strikes me as having a beard--and a goatee at that!

What Should We Fear?

In the wake of the Colorado shootings, the question has been asked if anywhere is safe anymore. The answer is surely no. But there is nothing new about that. Nowhere has ever been safe. You can slip on a bar of soap in the bathtub and die there as surely as you can die anywhere else.

My point is that there is no place or situation in life that is free from risk. It seems to me, therefore, that the real question we need to ask is “How big is the risk?” And it further seems to me that a realistic answer to that question is a far better gauge of what we should or should not fear than media hype.

Here’s what I mean. On last Friday night, or tonight for that matter, are you safer in a car or in a movie theater? Almost 8000 people died in auto accidents in just the first three months of the year.  Twelve died in a movie theater.   I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Or take another one. The average annual fatalities due to guns from 1980 to 2006 was just over 32,000. The average number of deaths due to alcohol (drunk driving) in that same time period is well over 40,000.  Likelihood of death by car (average annual auto fatalities) is higher still.  Which represents the greatest threat?

My point in this is in NO WAY to make a statement or suggestion about a political response or public legislation in regard to these things; it is solely to raise the questions of how we assess risk, how accurate we are in determining what we should really be afraid of, and how realistic our expectations are that we can control our environment so we don’t have to worry about bad stuff happening.

A final thought. What about our hyper –violent, over sexualized, raunchy culture? How much damage does that do to each and every one of us? To our families, and to our kids? Should we be worried about that? If so, what—if anything—can we do? If you want to look at causes of violence, study after study points to media in general, and movies in particular. Would guns have ever been a problem if the Colorado shooter never came to think of himself as the Joker in the first place? (BTW, I loved The Dark Knight Rises and have seen it twice…)

These are hard and complicated questions. They will not be answered here. But I think they are worth thinking about and discussing. (I prefer that such discussions be face to face, eyeball to eyeball, but maybe that’s just me.) The way things are is not necessarily the way they need to be.

The Friendless Jesus

Sometimes people think that the world in which Jesus lived was remarkably different than our own, and in some ways surely it was. But in other ways, perhaps the ways that matter most, what I find most remarkable is how similar the two are. For instance, in Jesus’ day there were also religious and political liberals and conservatives. They believed, as at least some people seem to do today, that the complexity and magnificence of reality could be fully explained in these two choices, and that being faithful to God or being a good person meant making a resolute and defining choice between the two.

The interesting thing is that Jesus wanted none of it, and this goes a long way to explaining why he was crucified. Because for Jesus extending grace was always more important than compliance, seeing truth in ways that challenge our cherished perceptions more important than smug self-righteousness, and  taking a hit for loving those different than us was more important than patting ourselves on the back, he refused to align himself with any one party or position.  In the end, this left him  no friends. There was no one who would lobby for him, who would call in a favor, who would exert pressure on the powers-that-be to act on his behalf.

The good news is that I think many local churches follow Jesus example.  We refuse to follow our culture in allowing our worlds to be reduced to only two options, on one side seeing those who disagree with us as haters, and on the other seeing them as infidels. Though we may differ in a great many things, we are united in following Jesus’ teaching to “love on another”, and so go hand in hand to worship.

The Perfect Tomato

As I walked by my neighbor's yard the other day, I noticed he had some absolutely perfect tomatoes.  Not only were they perfectly round, but they also had uniform deep red color without any green shoulders or splitting.  Impressed, I looked a little closer and realized his secret:  they are painted styrofoam balls.

The idea behind them is to deter the birds that were pecking holes in the real thing.   A couple pecks into a delicious looking "tomato"  ought to be enough to discourage them from further unauthorized taste testing.  So far, my neighbor reports that it is working.  Pretty darn clever, I think.

Five

As I am enjoying making tomato sauces from fresh picked garden tomatoes, I decided to take a cue from Hagen Dazs.   I'm calling my sauce "Five."  Like the simple but delicious ice cream, it has only five simple ingredients:  tomatoes, basil, olive oil, onions, and garlic.  Oh, and it takes about 5 hours to boil it all down...

Which is why I'm writing this post.  I got in a little later than I expected, which means I started the sauce a little later than I intended.  And that means I am still waiting for it to boil down and thicken up.

I ran into a little bit of trouble with this last time I made sauce.  One pot wasn't big enough, and the overflow made quite a mess.  So tonight. I have four pots going.  And  you know what?  It's still a mess. And I still have to clean it all up. 

It will only be worse in the morning, right?

There's a Party Going On

A hummingbird party, that is! This is just before the pictures I took for yesterday's post, when the celebration shifted into high gear and there were up to 8 birds at a single feeder.

If you like hummingbirds and are in the area, feel free to drop by.  The yard is full of hummers right now.  You don't have to knock--just walk around back.   If you so see some ripe tomatoes or overgrown basil, feel free to pick that too.  Now that VBS is over and I don't have a ready outlet for my produce, it is really starting to pile up.

As an added bonus, if you bring  your own slugs you can feed Ando (our grandturtle) and maybe even the catfish I've been training to eat out of my hand.    Now that's my kind of party!

Never Saw That Before!

Brandishing a fierce bill rather than a deadly sword, ruby-throated hummingbirds seem to share the Highlander's philosopy:  There can be only one. 

Ruby-throats are deadly serious about this. Because they need vast quantities of food to stoke the inferno that is their metabolism in order to survive,  they aren’t much into sharing. They claim a feeder for themselves and themselves alone (though a male may let a female feed after she has mated with him), strictly enforcing a zero-tolerance no-fly zone around it.

This leads to fierce, sometimes even lethal, battles.   Locked in combat, hummingbirds will come crashing down to the earth. Full contact, you can hear their bills  colliding in midair as they attack each other.  And if the initial attacks don’t drive off the challengers, then the dominant hummer will simply attempt to run the interloper down. Well-fed as the Lord of the Feeder, he will keep chasing the challenger until it has spent all its energy and perishes accordingly.

What this means is that you will rarely see more than one ruby-throated hummingbird at any given feeder at a time.  Imagine my surprise, then, to see six hummingbirds at a single feeder (I also have other feeders throughout the yard).  In the picture below, you can even see five them settled down and feeding.  I took a bunch of pics, as well as some video, and then just sat and watched in amazement.

First Contact

Part of my morning routine is rehanging the suet feeders I took down the night before so the raccoons don't get them.  If I get in late like I did last night, the morning routine will first include finding the feeder that raccoons took down and dragged who knows where so they can feast upon it.

Another part of the morning routine is refilling those hummingbird feeders that were emptied the day before.  This time of year the yard is full of hummers, so they go through the nectar pretty quick.

Anyway, this morning I was about to rehang a feeder when one of the hummers simply couldn't wait. With the feeder still in my hand, she lit upon it and began drinking deeply, paying me no mind whatsoever.

Wow.  Now that's a great way to start the day.