No Guts

I've more or less decided to pass on the opportunity to read a passage and speak at the informal church service on July 3rd. My reasons are as follows:

• I'm a gutless wimp (first and foremost)
• I really question the sincerity of my faith
• I don't trust myself to remain humble

The first is rather ironic because it can't be chalked up to a fear of public speaking. Not only do I do that for a living, but I will also conduct the annual meeting the following morning, in front of far more people, and I have no fear of that whatsoever. The fear here is really one of exposing a tender side of me. It's one thing to stand up and espouse the technical merits of some software, or keep a meeting on track. It's quite another to speak openly about something as deeply personal as one's faith in God.

The second bullet is the flip side of that -- I could probably manufacture a charade of sincerity in what I say. But it's one thing to feign sincerity about something I'm selling; it's another to do so for the Christian faith. There's a tremendous sense of "ought not" in my heart about that. Whether or not my faith is truly sincere or not is open to debate, and only the Lord himself knows for sure. Sometimes I wonder if my perfectionist tendencies haunt me here.

But it's the third that frightens me the most. I'm not sure I can remain truly humble, truly softspoken and truly Christ-like in what I say. I fear climbing on my self-righteous horse and demanding others take to heart things I myself may not even truly believe.

I am, in a word, a mess.

I'd like to think this is God's way of telling me that such things are not yet my calling. I have many things I must learn to do before I stand upright and walk. Patience ... so difficult, yet so necessary.

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It occurred to me the other day that may be a tension within the Christian faith regarding one's will. We are called to surrender our will to Christ, yet to do so requires a conscious act of the will. Is that a really a tension? Or is that perfectly reasonable -- that the act of giving something up may very well require the active and conscious exercise of that something? What would be a good analogy?

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The passage you pulled from the web looks to me to come from "The Prayer of Jabez," a book written by Bruce Wilkinson. Have you read that book? I'm not a huge fan of it, but I suppose it brings comfort to some. The secretary at the G'burg facility is a wonderfully sweet woman of apparently simple yet sincere faith. She drew tremendous comfort and inspiration from the book. So perhaps I should suspend judgment. :-)

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The "American Film Institute" ran a program on the 100 greatest lines from films. The number one was "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" (from Gone With The Wind). The number two line was "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse" (from The Godfather). The full list is here:

http://www.eonline.com/News/More/afi100quotes.html

There are lots of lines I like that aren't provided in this list. For instance, from the movie Dr. Strangelove they cite this line: "Gentleman! You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" That's a fine line ... I wouldn't take it out. But my favorite is delivered by a young James Earl Jones, the bombadier of the B-52. "The auto-destruct mechanism got hit and blew itself up." Or Slim Picken's line: "Hell, a feller could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that."

From the movie Ocean's Eleven there's an exchange I find brilliant. Brad Pitt is at the dog track with Carl Reiner, trying to recruit Reiner to join the team. Reiner is peeling an orange.

Pitt: "What's with the orange?"
Reiner: "My doctor says I need more vitamins."
Pitt: "Why don't you just take vitamins?"

Did you ever notice that in that movie the character played by Brad Pitt is seen eating in almost every scene? That had to have been intentional, but why? What's the reference there?