Past Ruminations...

September-October, 2002
  

Hello out there. I appreciate any of you who happen to stop by to see my periodic postings. Hopefully I have something interesting to say when I do post something.

Fighting the good fight. While reading a Motley Fool newsletter I noticed a quote they included by A. Einstein and it got me thinking beyond their economic usage.

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." -- Albert Einstein

The remarkable insight in this statement still reverberates throughout my thinking and will probably keep me noodling (internally debating) for some time.

When someone hurts or betrays us (speaking from a Christian "us" perspective) we are called to forgive them and then, if possible, to try and remedy the situation. While forgiveness may be hard, even very, very hard, we can relate to its inherent process.

Sidenote: I taken aback by the statements of forgiveness by the family of the first of the sniper attack victims to be buried, Prem Kumar Walekar. One young lady said in the snippet that was broadcast of her eulogy that as a Christian she extends Christian forgiveness to the person who shot her father. It was a hard thing to do.

However, fixing the problem that brought this event about is considerably more difficult than forgiving the perpetrator and Albert's insight comes into play. By this I do not mean that the victims of the sniper attacks personally created the situation that brought about their death. They did not. They were innocent victims (bearing no guilt in relation to whatever reason is driving the perpetrators of this horrid crime). But as we try to deal with the ongoing acts and their inevitable aftermath, we are faced with Albert's dilemma. We need new levels of thinking to approach any encompassing solution to this problem. Our old patterns will not work. A lot will depend on what we find out about the guilty parties and their motivation, but no matter what their motivation, we have to devise successful scenarios of future action.

So, what will we do? How will our thinking advance to address this horror? How will we maintain our civilization while its fundamental freedoms are assaulted by ever increasing barbarity, as these attacks demonstrate? I am not sure. However, one thing I do know, we must allow Christian love and forgiveness to inform the process. This does not mean we should be wishy-washy; quite the opposite. The new level of thinking demands that any justifiably retributive response be tempered with love and forgiveness, but a tough love and a forgiveness that does not demonize the situation.

It is not without reason that God stated "Vengeance is mine" (Roman 12:9) since He knows the utterly corrosive effect of that emotional reaction. Paul's full statement is very instructive. "Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, 'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,' says the Lord." In giving place to wrath we do not personalize the pain and anger. However, since God also states that governmental authority is an agent of His wrath against the lawbreaker "For he [governmental authority] is God's minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he [governmental authority] does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God's minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil." (Romans 13:4), we see that administrated vengeance (bearing the sword) is fundamentally necessary to maintaining order and discipline within society.

I believe that as we move forward into this age of terrorism and indiscriminate killing of innocents, we have to be very careful to also move to new level of thinking, to a place where the lawful and necessary retributive actions by governmental authority is tempered within our own hearts by a tough Christian love and forgiveness. Not only are these hideous actions a test of government, they are a test of our own souls, of our ability to think like new people and Christians know they are called to be new people, new creations. We need to learn how to desire and facilitate justice while not falling prey to to the destructive temptation to vengeance. We need to learn how to toughly love even the unlovable. I think the family of Prem Kumar Walekar showed how to start.
 

September 11th, a year later. Tonight and tomorrow will be filled with commentary on the terrorist attacks of a year ago. It will be hard to find someone who doesn't have something to say on the matter, whether pro or con to either the U.S. or the Islamic extremists who carried out the acts.

At least one rabid distortion is in the process of being laid to rest and that is the widely circulated (and widely believed in Arab circles) lie that it was actually Israel who carried out the attacks, aided and abetted by the CIA, to ramp up American opinion and American action against the Arab world and Islam itself. Thanks to Al-Jazeera, a video has been released that conclusively lays the attacks at the feet of al Qaida and Bin Laden. The video was made after the attacks but includes one of the hijackers giving a speech.

We will get you. We will humiliate you. We will never stop following you," said Abdulaziz Alomari, one of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

"God praise everybody who trained and helped me, namely the leader Sheikh Osama bin Laden. May God bless him. May God accept our deeds."

Clarity, thanks to an Arab source, has at last arrived to the Arab street, at least in this matter. One wonders if the reasonable Arab will begin to wonder where the truth really lies and begin to question the conventional wisdom of the propaganda mills. If the accusations against Israel in this matter have been proven a lie, what else might be a lie? Is that too much to ask, too much to hope for?

Who do you believe?  Talk about mixed signals. I get information from a lot of diverse sources: the internet, email lists, magazines, investment sources, news and intelligence sources, and my own hunches. Recently it seems everything is contradicting everything else. There are the "upswing is right around the corner" bull marketers, contrasted by the "collapse of the China banking system and the fall of the Japanese stock market will drag us all down" theorists. Both of these extreme scenarios and the less extreme ones begging for mindshare are complicated by the growing likelihood of war with Iraq and the possibility of a major terrorist event, which would strike a hard blow to our economic recovery.

Is the future rosy or bleak? How do you protect yourself and your family in the midst of such conflicting information? I am fairly intelligent and I can sift through an amazing amount of information and pull out critical paths and relevant information. It is what I do for a living. So if I am getting perplexed and finding everything muddled, what about the average person?

There is one thing I have come to a conclusion about, however. First and foremost, I believe you should retire your debt. Do everything possible to eliminate all of your indebtedness. Rather than leveraging your debt, retire it. Migrate to a cash existence where you are paying as you go and then build a 3-6 month cash reserve. You can still use your credit card, but you will use it as you would a checkbook, and then you pay it in full each month. That gives you a little float on your money and with cards like Discover, you even get cash back.

That is my current goal. All my other goals are currently subservient to that goal. I am on a crusade to rid myself of debt. If everything doesn't go to hell in a hand basket I will make a little less money than if I had leveraged my debt, but then I will have the cash to take advantage of that special situation that will inevitably show itself, so in the end it will all will balance out to my advantage. In addition, my wife will be much happier and one cannot put a monetary value on a happy wife.

Your mileage may vary.

Been away.  I have been away for a while, almost a month. I will try to get back into regular posting, but my workload stopped me from posting before and it may infringe again, since this is an avocation which is dependant on available time, as much as I wish that were not so.

Priorities.  Over the past weekend, I began to reassess my priorities and found they fall into four main categories: God, family, work, and personal. That order also expresses their importance, at least for me.

I found that one and two were getting shorted due to three and four. I am reversing that. One and two will be the most important, while three will never be shorted for four. This means my family, primarily my wife, but also my daughter will always come before work, not the other way around. While there are times that we need to legitimately sacrifice for work, those times will be exceptions, not the norm. This change in priority may also explain why this site, which falls into category four, may not be regularly updated.

Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 6:21 "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Treasure is better than money since it encompasses everything we hold dear, including fame, reputation, and any form of power. For some time I have been putting most of my treasure into my work or my personal wants. I need to change that and have begun to do so. I could in truth say that God and my family are my real treasures. As a result, they deserve the highest priority in my resource allocation. It will become so and I will depend on my wife to alert me when I am falling back into old habits.

We all need to examine where we place our time and resources and see if they match what we tell ourselves is important. The worst person of all to lie to is yourself. Self deception is pernicious, since by its very nature it is hard to unmask. It usually requires an outside impetus to get us below the deception. Friends are very important for helping us maintain our self honesty. Ask a friend to help you do an inventory of your priorities and your resource allocation, and be willing to listen if they have some unpalatable things to tell you. It is for your own good and to have such a friend is a great treasure.