Welcome to Rose City Nazarene Church.
From Dan's Desk Monday, May 5th, 2008
For some reason, yet again, the sermon did not get recorded (we are working on the problem). My apologies again to anyone wanting to hear it. The sermon that is posted is still worth your time. It deals with our vision and mission statements as presented in September of 2006... on to the blog...
…continuing on from last week about the one
thing that unites us all. Only a few are brave enough to resist its charms and
those that do find so much more - they adapt, overcome, and succeed. They
resist the temptation to whine. Yep, that’s it, whining, that great American
past time and coping mechanism. There was a time, so I’m told when baseball was
the past time of Americans, no longer. “What about depression?” you ask. It’s
second in line to whining. People resort to situational “depression” when
whining doesn’t work. Listen as you wait in line at the store. Listen to the
next booth at a restaurant, or the couple next to you just about anywhere, and
before long you will hear the all too familiar whine about being too busy, kids
not obeying, job not going as expected, marriage in a funk, how tight the money
is, and so on and so on.
When life gets tough, most people find the
first willing ear and begin to whine. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we are
becoming so fragmented in our society. Our world comes at us so fast through
twenty-four hour cable news, talk radio, and the Internet that we are left with
our heads spinning. In the confusion of fast up-to-date, real-time information,
not to mention mixed signals from confused people; we just don’t know what to
do, so we whine about it.
What we need is a
fixed point in space from which to gather our bearings. We need to stop whining
and find an anchoring point that serves as a filter and foundation in the storm
that our society is generating. We need to discover what it means and what it
looks like to slow down and “smell the roses” as it were. How do we do that? I
may have a suggestion or two – stay tuned.