the tindog coffeehouse

I was all set to write some sappy blog post about looking back over the year and looking ahead to 2009, but, eh, whatever. We all know this year has sucked in a lot of ways, and it’s been a tough one for our family, so who really wants to rehash all that?

So, as I enjoy the last couple of days of my vacation, I’ll just wish everyone out there on the Interwebs a happy New Year.

(And I promise I’ll try to be more interesting next week.)

Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:
“Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”

Luke 2:8-14, NKJV

Merry Christmas!

I began seeing friends on Facebook join a group called I Am Second, and it didn’t really mean anything. Then I saw it mentioned in an article in the Dallas Morning News. Hmm. OK, so what is this about?

That’s the question Plano-based e3 Partners Ministry hopes North Texans will ask as part of “I Am Second,” a multimillion-dollar media campaign intended to promote God as the source of a shared, purposeful life. The initiative – which began this month and is planned to last three years – has attracted professional athletes and Hollywood celebrities and drawn more than 160,000 Web site hits from people in at least 150 countries. …

The mysterious ads list a Web site – iamsecond.com – with provocative testimonial videos by celebrities like movie star Stephen Baldwin, Dallas Cowboys linebacker Greg Ellis and former NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip.

Dallas-area residents also share stories of eating disorders, loneliness, drug abuse and pornography addiction. The intimate clips appear more like the makings of a professional documentary than a homegrown church movement.

I have to admit, I wasn’t sold on the idea at first. To me, it seemed like another catchy pop-Christian movement like The Purpose-Driven Life, something that everyone at church is excited about for a while but then forgets when the new car smell wears off. What was the point, anyway, to get people to join I Am Second groups at church, probably sell bracelets and T-shirts that say, “I Am Second”? I don’t know. That kind of mass-marketed pop-culture Christianity gets a little old after a while. Why does Christianity have to have a catchphrase?

But that’s not what it’s really about, or at least I don’t think it is. The point of the campaign is to reach out to people, talk to them where they are, relate to the struggles that they’re going through. It’s to provide answers to the question of who Jesus is and why that matters to us.

Donald Miller writes in Blue Like Jazz:

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me. …

I hear addicts talk about the shakes and panic attacks and the highs and lows of resisting their habit, and to some degree I understand them because I have had habits of my own, but no drug is so powerful as the drug of self. No rut in the mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction.

And that’s what I Am Second is all about: realizing that we are not meant to be the most important things in our lives, that there is something — someone — greater than us, that there is a purpose and meaning beyond our immediate problems and circumstances.

I think it’s wonderful that this message would come at Christmas time. After all, that’s what Christmas is all about. “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son….”

Our lives, our problems, our stuff. That’s not what it’s all about. Putting God first, realizing that He is so much bigger than anything we might be facing, that’s when we can finally be free.

The Bible says that we are to die to ourselves, and in so doing, we will be able to live a new life, no longer bound to the problems of our old one (Romans 6:4-6).

And that’s the best Christmas gift anyone could ask for.

Check out the website: www.iamsecond.com

Aww, Knut, the formerly adorable polar bear of international fame, has a fan. Seems a “lonely” German man hopped into the 440-pound bear’s enclosure at the Berlin Zoo for a visit and autograph before police hauled him away.

Apparently, the man didn’t bother reading my earlier blog post in which it was pointed out that Knut has been labeled a “psychopath” by zoo officials. Yeah, that would’ve been a good thing to know ahead of time.

So what have we learned today, boys and girls?

First, read my blog before considering paying an up close and personal visit to a large zoo animal.

Second, just because a polar bear looks lonely, it doesn’t mean you should try to be its BFF. In all liklihood, it’s probably just bummed about that whole global warming thing. Instead, just push Al Gore over the railing and walk away.

Third, deranged former child stars can be led anywhere with a leg of beef.

Although the college football bowl season officially kicked off a few days ago with the EagleBank Bowl (?!), tonight it really begins when TCU faces off against Boise State in the Poinsettia Bowl.

This should be a great game between two strong teams. The Horned Frogs are 10-2 and ranked No. 11, while Boise State is undefeated and ranked No. 9. Both teams, of course, got shafted by the BCS and have lots to prove, which should make for an exciting game. (Thankfully, the game is in San Diego instead of on the Smurf-turf at Boise State!  Seriously, what in the heck is up with that blue Astroturf?!)

I have my share of complaints about the BCS system, which I’ve shared before, but one great by-product of it is that you often end up with some really entertaining games between teams that wouldn’t otherwise ever play each other, even in a playoff system.

I won’t make any predictions, but I’m certainly rooting for TCU to win big against the Broncos.

Go, Frogs!

How cool is it that one of Santa’s elves is on Twitter?

Hey, after the month I’ve had, a little bit of levity is greatly appreciated!

The government has burned through almost all of the first half of the $700,000,000,000 bailout rescue money approved by Congress in October. And only now are people beginning to wonder where the money has gone.

Salon.com has the easy answer: the banks are holding on to it.

With the benefit of hindsight, lawmakers now express regret about the way the bailout was handled — with few provisions for oversight of the banks or the Bush administration — and the public hates it more than ever. The feeling that money and political capital were squandered even helped endanger the far cheaper and more popular bailout of the auto industry. So what went wrong — and where did all that money go?

A lot of it is, apparently, just sitting in the bank. A Government Accounting Office audit released earlier this month showed the Treasury Department doling out buckets of cash: $15 billion for Bank of America, $45 billion for Citigroup, $3.5 billion to Capital One, nearly $6.6 billion to U.S. Bancorp. …

“There is a black box where that checkbook is, and we can’t see into it,” Ellis said. “Once the money leaves Treasury’s hands, we have very little knowledge as to what the heck we’re getting for the billions of dollars.”

Now, even the people who designed the bailout say they’re not happy about it. In the rush to action they didn’t place enough controls on how the administration doled out the money, or what the institutions did with it once they got it.

Is anyone really surprised by this? Congress rushes to push through the biggest bailout in U.S. history — which didn’t even pass the first time around! — with almost no debate and without specific language as to how the banks were to use the money, and we’re supposed to just assume the banks will do the right thing?

Of course they’re going to hold on to the money as long as they have a say about it! The banks are for-profit companies like anyone else, and they’ve been losing money — lots of it — like anyone else. They haven’t been able to borrow from other banks and aren’t thrilled about lending to banks themselves. They can’t repackage and sell their current loans like they have been, and they know a lot of loans they issue to consumers will likely be defaulted on.

So now the federal government comes in and hands them several billion dollars with almost no strings attached. They can either loan it out to other banks and/or consumers and probably never see it again, or they can stick it away in order to weather the storm. If you were a bank, what would you do?

Earlier in the year, the government handed out tax rebates to everyone with the intention they would turn around and spend all the money, but what happened? A lot of people didn’t spend it; they put it back into savings or paid off debt with it. Isn’t that pretty much the same thing the banks are doing now with the billions in bailout money?

Salon is quick to echo the arguments of Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats that this is all the fault of the Bush administration, but if you’re going to blame anyone in this, blame Congress. They were the ones who wrote the legislation and they were the ones who passed it. Don’t forget, Pelosi voted for the bailout herself and also has been one of the more vocal proponents for an auto industry bailout.

Related:
$700 Billion bailout ‘letting’ the banks win?

The Big 3 automakers don’t need a bailout, they just need to build amphibious cars!

In keeping with this week’s “presidential exit interview” theme, I thought it would be good to take a look at President Bush’s interview with ABC’s Cynthia McFadden, which aired on Nightline earlier in the week.

The part of the interview that seems to be getting the most attention is when McFadden asks the President about his faith. While some of the answers are pretty good, there are a few that I disagree with.

Below are some of his responses and my comments on them. (And by the way, I’m sorry for the extremely long post here.)

Bush said he is often asked if he thinks he was chosen by God to be president.

“I just, I can’t go there,” he said. “I’m not that confident in knowing, you know, the Almighty, to be able to say, ‘Yeah, God wanted me of all the other people.’ My relationship [with God] is on a personal basis trying to become as closer to the Almighty as I possibly can get. And I’ve got a lot of problems. I mean, I got, you know, the ego … all the things that prevent me from being closer to the Almighty. So, I don’t analyze my relationship with the good Lord in terms of, well, you know, God has plucked you out or God wants you to do this. I know this: I know that the call is to better understand and live out your life according to the will of God.”

Me: I like his answer here, especially the last sentence. But it bothers me that he constantly refers to God as “the Almighty”. Just seems very politically correct to me.

“People say, ‘But how do you know that it’s because of prayer?’ And I guess the answer is because of faith is how I know — I can’t prove it for you. People, you know, say it’s just a crutch. For me, it’s not a crutch, for me it’s the realization of a power of a universal God and recognition that the God came manifested in human and then died for sins. Now, all of this was hard for me to understand for a period of time and I am still trying to understand as best as my human mind can possibly do so. But in the understanding and in the search and in the quest, I find comfort and strength.”

Me: Well said.

When asked if he thinks that he prays to the same God as those with different beliefs, Bush said, “I do.”

“I do believe there is an Almighty that is broad and big enough and loving enough that can encompass a lot of people…”

Me: Incorrect. The Muslim God (Allah) is not considered by Muslims to be the same as the Judeo-Christian God (Yahweh). Therefore, Muslims do not pray to the same God that Jews and Christians do. And Buddhists and Hindus likewise do not pray to God. Further, because Jews do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Son of God, then it’s fair to say they don’t pray to the same God (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) that Christians do.

Jesus was very clear that He is the “way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  (John 14:6).

Interviewer Cynthia McFadden asked Bush if the Bible was literally true.

“You know. Probably not. … No, I’m not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it, but I do think that the New Testament for example is … has got … You know, the important lesson is ‘God sent a son,’” Bush said.

(Quote taken from here.)

Me: OK, I’m going to give Bush the benefit of the doubt here. As he alluded to here, there is a difference between a biblical literalist (i.e. one who accepts every single word of the Bible as true, including that the universe and mankind were created in six 24-hour days) and a biblical fundamentalist (i.e. one who maintains that the Bible is God’s Holy Word but who can also accept that it contains some allegory or symbolism).

President Bush is presumably saying here that he’s more of a fundamentalist, although most viewers would not understand that distinction.

Asked about creation and evolution, Bush said, “I think you can have both. I think evolution can — you’re getting me way out of my lane here. I’m just a simple president. But it’s, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don’t think it’s incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.”

He added: “I happen to believe that evolution doesn’t fully explain the mystery of life.”

Me: I agree and I disagree.

Christianity can be summed up in four basic truths: (1) God created the universe and everything in it, and humans were created distinctly in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). (2) Mankind disobeyed God, causing us to be separated from Him.  Romans 6:23 says that the punishment for that disobedience is death, meaning Hell. (3) God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to earth to pay that penalty for us by dying on the cross. Three days after His death, Jesus was resurrected and now sits at God’s right hand in Heaven. (4) By repenting of our sin and acknowledging that Jesus is Lord of our lives, we can be forgiven of our sins and reborn spiritually in order that we can live eternally in Heaven.

If you remove any of those truths from the equation, then it’s no longer consistent with the Bible. Therefore, you can’t as a Christian believe that humans evolved from another organism or species.

However, that is not to say that evolution cannot co-exist with Creation. Evolution, if you define it as plants and animals adapting over time to their environment, is not inconsistent with the Bible (at least as I see it). So I can allow for the existence of evolution up to a point. But again, if you take out that first biblical truth, then all other aspects of Christianity don’t make any sense.

So what is President Bush saying here exactly? It’s not 100% clear. But I suspect, based on the way he framed the answer, that he’s acknowledging the limited version of evolution I just described.

Again, with a lot of these answers, it’s difficult to know exactly where he stands on a lot of these things. Certainly, many Christians will disagree with him, and I’m sure others will misunderstand him. As I’ve said before, though, our faith should never be in any politician, but in God Himself.

… and sometimes life lives you.

How true.

National Review’s Jay Nordlinger had a chance to interview President Bush about his presidency and put a whole bunch of quotes from the interview into his column.

Here are a few of the more interesting ones, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

On the troop surge in Iraq:

“And I can’t remember the moment, but I know full well [National Security Adviser] Steve [Hadley] and I said, ‘We’re going to figure out and get to the bottom of this thing . . .’ And you’ve got to understand: With me, I’m thinking victory the whole time. And I fully understood the consequences of defeat — which are easier to explain, by the way, than the consequences of victory. And so we started to assess, and the different options started bubbling up, I guess, toward the end of the summer [’06] . . .

“The way it should work for a president on a decision this big is to make sure everybody has a chance to express themselves. I guess you could try to hastily make a decision of this magnitude and say, ‘This is the way it is.’ On the other hand, when you’re implementing a decision of this magnitude, where people’s lives would be at stake, it is important to give a lot of different stakeholders a chance to express their opinion. The president says, ‘It’s not working, we must assess, and what is it going to take to win?’

“And there were a lot of opinions during this period of time — a lot. Which is good for the president. You really don’t want homogenized decision-making. And opinions ranged from Get out, to Get out of Baghdad, step back, and hope the violence which will occur as a result of the vacuum doesn’t spill out.” Some people said, “Okay, some troops” — and eventually, “as a result of a lot of interagency working,” there were 30,000 additional troops: the surge. “Why? Because that’s what it would take to win, or to achieve the objective.”

On abortion:

“One of the principles by which I have conducted my presidency is, all life is precious, and a society, a whole society, is one that treats the most vulnerable with respect and care. And I believe the most vulnerable — one of the most vulnerable is the unborn person, unborn child.”

He also felt the need to say, “I fully understand the importance of science.”

On a “culture of life,” he said, “I’ve always said laws change once hearts change. I think there’s [now] a better appreciation of the importance of protecting life; that the debate has somewhat shifted from one of civil rights to one group of people to civil rights to the unborn.”

On popularity with other nations:

“You can get short-term popularity in the Middle East if you want, by blaming all problems on Israel. That’ll make you popular. You can be popular in certain salons of Europe if you say, ‘Okay, we’ll join the International Criminal Court.’ I could have been popular if I’d said, ‘Oh, Kyoto is the way to deal with the environmental problem.’ That would have made me liked. It would have made me wrong, however. And, ultimately, you earn people’s respect by articulating a set of principles and standing by them.

“You know, popularity comes and goes. It just does. It comes and goes for an individual or a nation. But principles are enduring.”

On principles:

“I’m comfortable that I have made principled decisions for eight years — that I was unwilling to sacrifice those principles for the sake of short-term approbation, approval, or whatever you want to call it.”

It’s refreshing to hear President Bush speak so freely without the filter of a biased media.

I must say I’ve disagreed with him on a number of things over the course of his presidency, but I’ve always respected him for acting on his principles. One of his greatest strengths (and possibly his weaknesses) is that he always fought for what he believed in, whether it was popular or not. Quite a difference from Bill Clinton, who never had a genuine conviction in his life.

As Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison inches closer to officially running for Texas governor, the question becomes, when will she resign from the Senate? Paul Burka says sooner rather than later, in order to deprive Rick Perry of additional ammunition in the form of controversial Senate votes.

Between that and the fight to dislodge Tom Craddick from his role as Speaker of the House, 2009 is shaping up to be a very interesting year in Austin.

Gotta love Texas politics!