It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer — the achiever the one who recognizes the challenge and does something about it.
Author: Dell Deaton
… you are obsessed with whether the godless will be judged.
Don’t worry, judgment and justice will be upheld.
— New Living Translation
Captain James T Kirk (William Shatner):
Risk is part of the game. You want to sit in that chair?
— Rick Berman
When you came to worship me, who asked you to parade through my courts with all your ceremony?
… I want no more of your pious meetings.
— New Living Translation
recollect
transitive verb
- to bring back to the level of conscious awareness : [remember] trying to recollect the name
- to remind (oneself) of something temporarily forgotten
intransitive verb
- to call something to mind
— Merriam-Webster
Dates back to watching live television coverage of the US Senate Watergate hearings for me, and the too-often repeated phrase, “I do not recollect.”
When Ahab saw him, he exclaimed, “So, is it really you, you troublemaker of Israel?”
“I have made no trouble for Israel,” Elijah replied. “You and your family are the troublemakers, for you have refused to obey the commands of the Lord ….”
— New Living Translation
Question posed:
Who would you like to aim a loaded phaser at?
Answer, Jolene Blalock, well-known for playing the role of T’Pol on Star Trek: Enterprise, as interviewed for Maxim:
People who require drama like it’s their lifeblood. Even if nothing is wrong, there’s got to be something wrong.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell me, if you know so much.
— New Living Translation
As I’ve grown older, I’ve found fewer and fewer absolutes.
Five years ago or so, on a canoe trip with an acquaintance, the subject of “joining” came up — as in becoming a member of an organization. He’d joined a local church and we were discussing what he actually knew about it, the seriousness of the commitment.
Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to know much. How could one make such a significant commitment based on so little information?
“If I don’t like it, I’ll quit,” he answered simply.
In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
My father’s generation joined companies out of high school or college, and stayed with them for life. My generation saw companies treat their “human resources” no better than plastic buildings on a Monopoly board. Whole departments and divisions and larger were subject to being wiped out in service to some senior executive’s need to hit an EBIT target upon which some suit’s stretch-bonus depended.
Although I don’t revisit my past (see Genesis 19:26) — wouldn’t do a thing different even if I could — I do wonder upon reflection if I haven’t had a problem of sticking with some things for far too long.
I don’t think “quit” need be viewed today as the pejorative it might once have seemed to have been.
That’s not to advocate making the sort of hollow commitments that came so easily to canoe-trip-guy. Due diligence largely instructs my looks-before-leaps.
But the story of Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t limited to Genesis 19:24, which reads: “The the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah….”
No, it starts over two pages earlier in my NIV. Second chances abounded. With each succession, it looks to me like the bar was lowered beyond that which anyone should have expected. Warnings were clear.
My Grandma Deaton used to muse about folks who’d stick with organizations that had “quit us” long ago. In the Bible story here, I think Sodom and Gomorrah quit God long before God quit Sodom and Gomorrah.
Commitment is important. But there’s gotta be a reasonable basis for it.
I don’t think it’s wrong to say “enough is enough” when you have, indeed, had enough. How do you know when that is? Pray for discernment.
Amen.
Ian Fleming is said to have been most disciplined in showing different aspects of himself to different groups.
You saw only what he, with conscious direction and discipline, wanted you to see. As a result, two strangers could meet, each thinking he “knew” Mr. Fleming — but neither in the end would continue to believe this after they’d compared notes in conversation.
To lesser or greater extents, we all do this, of course. Relaxed at home is different from workplace. Project meetings are different from end-of-the-day unwinds with those very same colleagues on the road at a trade show.
And it wasn’t that many years ago that it actually took a bit of effort to really flesh out every disparate aspect of a Supreme Court nominee’s background.
“Screen names” used on Internet Forums and Chat Rooms provided somewhat of a challenge in connecting the person expressing views on movie interests on what part of the Internet with that same person’s pitch to would-be romantic persuits on another.
But what are you gonna do with Facebook?
You can spend years developing expertise and respect in advanced rocket science if you’d like. Still, that image will forever onward be seasoned with high school connections from decades past to the choice you made for prom date.
It’s all “who you are.”