Confessions of a Christmas Junkie

I am not typically a holiday person. My socially phobic nature would have me out of costume at Halloween, staying in New Year’s Eve, and away from the crowds on the Fourth of July if it weren’t for a wife who drags me out.

    Somehow, this all changes at Christmas. Instead of dragged down, I’m somehow energized by it. I love everything about it. My winter doldrums and seasonal affective disorder always lifts for a few weeks, until it comes crashing back down each January.

  

The Prayer of the Children

   Isabella Mori, at Change Therapy tagged me earlier this week to participate in Blog Action Day, October 15th, in a crusade to tackle one of the great plagues of mankind, Poverty.  I have been very extraordinarily busy this month and my blogging has suffered but I figure better late than never.

  It turns out that one simple thing we all can do is click.  Yes, you can fight poverty by surfing the internet.  I am told that Doctors without Borders, a charity that is currently leading the fight against poverty in the neglected regions as Darfur in the Sudan and in Haiti, can use your help in an internet bid to award the most voted charity 1 million dollars.   Please Click here to vote, or you can click here to head on over to Scott Schachters blog and learn more.

      My problem remains, I don’t know that I have anything earth shattering or enlightening to share on the subject.  I was feeling powerless and paralyzed until I read these words from author Gretchen Rubin at the Happiness project. 

One of the most important principles I’ve learned from my happiness research is that although we assume that we act because of the way we feel, often we feel because of the way we act.

This is a case where actions are more powerful than words.  My pessimistic side tells me that if there was an easy solution to this, I think we would likely have rid ourselves of it long ago.  That doesn’t change the fact that I CAN do something, earth changing or not.  So in the spirit of doing what I can, when I have no idea what I can do, other than give to worthy charities such as Oxfam, the Salvation Army, or the Humanitarian Aid fund of my church, I share this video. 

     This song was written by fellow Mormon Kurt Bestor and captures the poignancy of the problem from God’s perspective in a manner that will rip at your heartstrings.  Can you hear the prayer of the children? 

Those People

    As the presidential debates get revved up, I have been scrutinizing their health care plans.  Both candidates rightly insist that something must be done to cover the ballooning and exploding population of uninsured in this country.  For both, the solution will likely include a hit to the pocketbook of Joe Public, whether through taxes, or through private insurance companies that we are required to purchase coverage from.  This has the standard libertarian masses quite upset.  One thing I am hearing more and more about in the argument against universal Health care coverage is “those people.”

Points of Interest #29

It’s here again and back on schedule.  This week I’ve got emotion, fear and stigmatization on the mind, parables, heaven and hell and success for the soul and whoopee cushions, spleens and lots and lots of protein for the body, to name just a few.  So without further delay I present especially for you, the reader, the creme de la creme of the internet I happened to have stumbled across surfing the internets-

Points of Interest, #17

It’s back, while I may not have time to come up with anything worth reading out of my head, I am more than happy to share the wealth of what someone else wrote. Meanwhile, I continue to tread water on the wards.

Pure motives

C.S. Lewis once wrote that “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it  than the next man.” I think one glance a popular culture can give us an idea of how saturated we are with this. It’s everywhere.

     There is not a sport in existence where people don’t make lists of the “greatest players.” It goes beyond statistics as the greatest players are the ones with championships.  In other words, they are the ones playing on the greatest teams. This is somewhat confusing because the whole idea of a team is to be a single unit, greater than the sum of its parts.   It is difficult to even conceive of greatest in a manner that doesn’t mean beating everyone else?

Points of interest 3/29

Welcome one and all readers of my blog. I am having a bit of writing block right now, but hey, it seems failures are as important as successes. In my surfing, here are some of the many successes I have come across.

The Gift of life- or please don’t send your organs to the organ grinder

  The human body is a wonderful and marvelous gift.  As wonderful as it is for us as individuals, it can also be a wonderful gift for the good of mankind.  I posted a recent link about a special group of individuals.   Every medical student, along with many other training medical professionals has the opportunity, in order to learn the art of medicine, to open up the empty shell left behind by these people in mortality and study it firsthand, orienting themselves to the structures that they will later learn the marvelous functions of.  They donate their bodies to science, where we can learn from them prior to their returning to the dust and apply that knowledge to the healing of others.