The Pinnacle of Success? Michael Jackson's Legacy
Chuck Colson
This commentary by Chuck Colson, the famous Hatchet Man from Watergate, has a real thought-provoker here. Once again, I am borrowing...it's so worth it! I very much loved Michael, and hated all he faced in life. I'm glad God is God and I'm not.
BreakPoint
I am an aging, white conservative Baptist. My taste in music runs from Bach to Mozart to Lawrence Welk. Indeed, my staff might say I am the un-hippest man alive.
So you might think that I am surprised by the frenzied and non-stop media coverage of the death of Michael Jackson—perhaps the greatest pop star of all time. But I’m not.
You may think that I don’t “get” why his fans by the millions are grieving, buying up Jackson CDs like they are going out of style, holding vigils at his mansion, desperately trying to get tickets to his memorial service in Los Angeles. But I do.
Here is why they have reason to mourn: Michael Jackson was, by any standard, a musical genius. His albums and his videos thrilled successive generations of pop fans. In fact, I was enthralled myself when I first watched his video presentation at an Epcot exhibit some 20 years ago.
There was, indeed, no one quite like Michael Jackson. And now there will be no new albums, no comeback concert tour, no new dance moves. That’s why they’re mourning.
But here’s why they—and all of us—should mourn the real tragedy that Michael Jackson’s story is. Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic Monthly blog said it well: Michael Jackson “was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.” He was, as Sullivan noted, nothing but a creature of our culture, which puts “fame and celebrity” at its core, with money as its driving force, without regard for the person caught up in it or the character he exhibits.
By numerous published accounts, Jackson was emotionally abused by his father, a man consumed by the idea that his child could be a superstar. Jackson was a drug addict accused of pedophilia, given to all manner of bizarre behavior. He was, in the end, as Bob Herbert opined in the New York Times, “psychologically disabled, to the point where he was a danger to himself and others.”
It makes the scenes of adoring crowds pushing and shoving to get near yesterday’s memorial service, and the non-stop live television coverage, all the more bizarre and tragic. We worship the celebrity for his fame, degenerate lifestyle not withstanding.
Jackson achieved the summit of what this culture values most—fame—and paid for it with his life. And that is a tragedy.
Life is filled with teaching moments. And for parents, this tragedy is an opportunity to talk with our children about what they really want out of life—what matters most.
And it’s also a time for parents to look in the mirror and ask what we really want for our kids. If the answer is success in life, then we had better know what that definition of success is.
That’s because even Christian parents are not immune to the siren song of fame and fortune for their kids. It’s great that your child can sing and dance. It’s wonderful that he can hit a baseball a country mile. She just might win that academic scholarship to Harvard.
But winning that scholarship, or playing in the major leagues, is not the Christian definition of success. Doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with your God is.
Character matters. Not fame. No matter how un-hip that sounds.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Colson’s daily BreakPoint commentary airs each weekday on more than one thousand outlets with an estimated listening audience of one million people. BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
What a God!
A friend sent this to me---so encouraging and inspiring! We serve a creative and mighty God.
What an awesome and orderly GOD!!
God's accuracy may be observed in the hatching of eggs.
For example:
-the eggs of the potato bug hatch in 7 days;
-those of the canary in 14 days;
-those of the barnyard hen in 21 days;
-The eggs of ducks and geese hatch in 28 days;
-those of the mallard in 35 days;
-The eggs of the parrot and the ostrich hatch in 42 days.
(Notice, they are all divisible by seven, the number of days in a week!)
The lives of each of you may be ordered by the Lord in a beautiful way
for His glory, if you will only entrust Him with your life. If you try
to regulate your own life, it will only be a mess and a failure. Only
the One Who made the brain and the heart can successfully guide them to
a profitable end.
God's wisdom is seen in the making of an elephant... The four legs of
this great beast all bend forward in the same direction. No other
quadruped is so made. God planned that this animal would have a huge
body, too large to live on two legs. For this reason He gave it four
fulcrums so that it can rise from the ground easily.
The horse rises from the ground on its two front legs first. A cow
rises from the ground with its two hind legs first. How wise the Lord
is in all His works of creation!
God's wisdom is revealed in His arrangement of sections and segments, as
well as in the number of grains.
-Each watermelon has an even number of strips on the rind.
-Each orange has an even number of segments.
-Each ear of corn has an even number of rows.
-Each stalk of wheat has an even number of grains.
-Every bunch of bananas has on its lowest row an even number of bananas,
and each row decreases by one, so that one row has an even number and
the next row an odd number.
-The waves of the sea roll in on shore twenty-six to the minute in all
kinds of weather.
-All grains are found in even numbers on the stalks, and the Lord
specified thirty fold, sixty fold, and a hundredfold - all even numbers.
God has caused the flowers to blossom at certain specified times during
the day, so that Linnaeus, the great botanist, once said that if he had
a conservatory containing the right kind of soil, moisture and
temperature, he could tell the time of day or night by the flowers that
were open and those that were closed!
Thus the Lord in His wonderful grace can arrange the life that is
entrusted to His care in such a way that it will carry out His purposes
and plans, and will be fragrant with His presence.
Only the God-planned safe life is successful. Only the life given over
to the care of the Lord is fulfilled.
What an awesome and orderly GOD!!
God's accuracy may be observed in the hatching of eggs.
For example:
-the eggs of the potato bug hatch in 7 days;
-those of the canary in 14 days;
-those of the barnyard hen in 21 days;
-The eggs of ducks and geese hatch in 28 days;
-those of the mallard in 35 days;
-The eggs of the parrot and the ostrich hatch in 42 days.
(Notice, they are all divisible by seven, the number of days in a week!)
The lives of each of you may be ordered by the Lord in a beautiful way
for His glory, if you will only entrust Him with your life. If you try
to regulate your own life, it will only be a mess and a failure. Only
the One Who made the brain and the heart can successfully guide them to
a profitable end.
God's wisdom is seen in the making of an elephant... The four legs of
this great beast all bend forward in the same direction. No other
quadruped is so made. God planned that this animal would have a huge
body, too large to live on two legs. For this reason He gave it four
fulcrums so that it can rise from the ground easily.
The horse rises from the ground on its two front legs first. A cow
rises from the ground with its two hind legs first. How wise the Lord
is in all His works of creation!
God's wisdom is revealed in His arrangement of sections and segments, as
well as in the number of grains.
-Each watermelon has an even number of strips on the rind.
-Each orange has an even number of segments.
-Each ear of corn has an even number of rows.
-Each stalk of wheat has an even number of grains.
-Every bunch of bananas has on its lowest row an even number of bananas,
and each row decreases by one, so that one row has an even number and
the next row an odd number.
-The waves of the sea roll in on shore twenty-six to the minute in all
kinds of weather.
-All grains are found in even numbers on the stalks, and the Lord
specified thirty fold, sixty fold, and a hundredfold - all even numbers.
God has caused the flowers to blossom at certain specified times during
the day, so that Linnaeus, the great botanist, once said that if he had
a conservatory containing the right kind of soil, moisture and
temperature, he could tell the time of day or night by the flowers that
were open and those that were closed!
Thus the Lord in His wonderful grace can arrange the life that is
entrusted to His care in such a way that it will carry out His purposes
and plans, and will be fragrant with His presence.
Only the God-planned safe life is successful. Only the life given over
to the care of the Lord is fulfilled.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Elephants and Dads
One of my favorite authors is Donald Miller. His life was shaped by the absence of a father, and he writes pognantly about it. FATHER'S DAY is a great time to refelect on how important good male role models are in our lives.
“I learned a great deal about myself while watching a documentary a few years ago about elephants in a wildlife trust in Africa. There were twenty-five elephants, all of them orphans, and they had been brought to the trust twenty years before. They were becoming teenagers– in elephant years. The girls were adequate, getting along with the other elephants, but there were a few boys who were causing a great deal of trouble. The narrator talked about the frustrations these few elephants were feeling because they had gone into early musth cycles, which showed up as a green pus running down their right hind leg. This phase produced aggressive and violent behavior, the elephant equivalent of sexual frustration.
The narrator in the documentary said the elephant musth cycle beings in adolescence, and normally lasts only a few days. But among these orphans, the musth cycle was disrupted and had become unusually long. These elephants were taking out their aggression on rhinos that bathed at a local mud pool. An elephant would slowly lumber down to the pool, enter near a rhino, then spear it through the side with his tusks. The elephant would then lean his gargantuan forehead into the head of the rhino, holding the beast underwater until it drowned. The filmmakers followed these orphan elephants who were always on their own, staggering about the wildlife refuge, fueled by a pent-up aggression they couldn’t understand. They weren’t acting like elephants– they didn’t know what an elephant was supposed to do with all his energy, all his muscle.
Occasionally, two elephants in musth would meet, and the encounter was always violent, going so far as to uproot trees in the fray of their brawl. When both beasts, bloodied, lumbered their separate ways alone– without a family, without a tribe– I couldn’t help but identify. I have never killed a rhino, or much of anything for that matter, but there have been times in my life when I didn’t know exactly how to be. I mean, there were feelings, sometimes anger, sometimes depression, sometimes raging lust, and I was never sure what any of it was about. I just felt like killing somebody, or sleeping with some girl, or decking a guy in a bar, and I didn’t know what to do with any of these feelings. Life was a confusing series of emotions rubbing against events. I wasn’t sure how to manage myself, how to talk to a woman, how to build a career, how to– well, be a man.
To me, life was something you had to stumble through alone. It wasn’t something you enjoyed or conquered, it was something that happened to you, and you didn’t have a whole lot of say about the way it turned out. You just acted out your feelings and hoped you never got caught.
Watching television that night, however, the narrator began to speak of a kind of hope for these elephants. Elephant development, apparently, begins very early. Female elephants are only capable of having children once every two years, and during those two years between babies, the young are cared for obsessively by their mothers. They are fed, sheltered, loved, and guided in their learning of basic survival.
It is only at the first musth cycle that a young male elephant leaves his mother and enters into the African wild, searching for a mentor, a guide. The green pus running down his hind leg and his smell like fresh-cut grass alerts an older, fully mature male, that this is a young elephant in need of guidance. Upon finding a mentor, the young elephant’s musth cycle ends. The older and younger begin to travel together, to find food together, to protect each other– the older one teaching the younger what elephant strength is for, and how to use it for the benefit of himself and the tribe.
Watching television that night, I wondered if humans aren’t like that, too. I began to wonder if we guys were designed to have a father, whose very presence would cause us to understand more accurately what our muscle is for, what we are supposed to do with our energy.
You have to wonder, don’t you? Some statistics state as many as 85 percent of the guys in prison grew up without a dad. This is sobering to me.
And so watching the documentary, I began to wonder if those of us without dads aren’t making mistakes in our lives we wouldn’t make if we had a father to guide us. I wondered if there isn’t a better paradigm for our existence– a way of being men, a way each of us could truly embrace if it were instilled in us by a man who spoke with altruism and authority. I wondered if people who grow up with great fathers don’t walk around with a subconscious sense they are wanted on this planet, that they belong, and the world needs them. And I wondered this: Is there practical information we are supposed to know about work, women, decisions, authority, leadership, marriage, and family that we would have learned if there were a guide around to help us navigate our journey? I wondered if some of the confusing emotions I was feeling weren’t a kind of suspended adolescence from which the presence of an older man might have delivered me.
– Excerpt from To Own A Dragon, by Donald Miller (pp 31-34)
"If you are a dad, thanks for being a dad, thanks for loving your kids. They need it, by design. And if you have a strained or absent relationship with your dad, take all the comfort in the world that we have a father who has not neglected us. The job of our earthly fathers has always been to introduce their children to their “real” dad. And as insufficient as your earthly father was, take comfort in the fact your “real” dad fathers perfectly. We are not victims. All of our trials are blessings. What an incredible opportunity to introduce people to their real father."
“I learned a great deal about myself while watching a documentary a few years ago about elephants in a wildlife trust in Africa. There were twenty-five elephants, all of them orphans, and they had been brought to the trust twenty years before. They were becoming teenagers– in elephant years. The girls were adequate, getting along with the other elephants, but there were a few boys who were causing a great deal of trouble. The narrator talked about the frustrations these few elephants were feeling because they had gone into early musth cycles, which showed up as a green pus running down their right hind leg. This phase produced aggressive and violent behavior, the elephant equivalent of sexual frustration.
The narrator in the documentary said the elephant musth cycle beings in adolescence, and normally lasts only a few days. But among these orphans, the musth cycle was disrupted and had become unusually long. These elephants were taking out their aggression on rhinos that bathed at a local mud pool. An elephant would slowly lumber down to the pool, enter near a rhino, then spear it through the side with his tusks. The elephant would then lean his gargantuan forehead into the head of the rhino, holding the beast underwater until it drowned. The filmmakers followed these orphan elephants who were always on their own, staggering about the wildlife refuge, fueled by a pent-up aggression they couldn’t understand. They weren’t acting like elephants– they didn’t know what an elephant was supposed to do with all his energy, all his muscle.
Occasionally, two elephants in musth would meet, and the encounter was always violent, going so far as to uproot trees in the fray of their brawl. When both beasts, bloodied, lumbered their separate ways alone– without a family, without a tribe– I couldn’t help but identify. I have never killed a rhino, or much of anything for that matter, but there have been times in my life when I didn’t know exactly how to be. I mean, there were feelings, sometimes anger, sometimes depression, sometimes raging lust, and I was never sure what any of it was about. I just felt like killing somebody, or sleeping with some girl, or decking a guy in a bar, and I didn’t know what to do with any of these feelings. Life was a confusing series of emotions rubbing against events. I wasn’t sure how to manage myself, how to talk to a woman, how to build a career, how to– well, be a man.
To me, life was something you had to stumble through alone. It wasn’t something you enjoyed or conquered, it was something that happened to you, and you didn’t have a whole lot of say about the way it turned out. You just acted out your feelings and hoped you never got caught.
Watching television that night, however, the narrator began to speak of a kind of hope for these elephants. Elephant development, apparently, begins very early. Female elephants are only capable of having children once every two years, and during those two years between babies, the young are cared for obsessively by their mothers. They are fed, sheltered, loved, and guided in their learning of basic survival.
It is only at the first musth cycle that a young male elephant leaves his mother and enters into the African wild, searching for a mentor, a guide. The green pus running down his hind leg and his smell like fresh-cut grass alerts an older, fully mature male, that this is a young elephant in need of guidance. Upon finding a mentor, the young elephant’s musth cycle ends. The older and younger begin to travel together, to find food together, to protect each other– the older one teaching the younger what elephant strength is for, and how to use it for the benefit of himself and the tribe.
Watching television that night, I wondered if humans aren’t like that, too. I began to wonder if we guys were designed to have a father, whose very presence would cause us to understand more accurately what our muscle is for, what we are supposed to do with our energy.
You have to wonder, don’t you? Some statistics state as many as 85 percent of the guys in prison grew up without a dad. This is sobering to me.
And so watching the documentary, I began to wonder if those of us without dads aren’t making mistakes in our lives we wouldn’t make if we had a father to guide us. I wondered if there isn’t a better paradigm for our existence– a way of being men, a way each of us could truly embrace if it were instilled in us by a man who spoke with altruism and authority. I wondered if people who grow up with great fathers don’t walk around with a subconscious sense they are wanted on this planet, that they belong, and the world needs them. And I wondered this: Is there practical information we are supposed to know about work, women, decisions, authority, leadership, marriage, and family that we would have learned if there were a guide around to help us navigate our journey? I wondered if some of the confusing emotions I was feeling weren’t a kind of suspended adolescence from which the presence of an older man might have delivered me.
– Excerpt from To Own A Dragon, by Donald Miller (pp 31-34)
"If you are a dad, thanks for being a dad, thanks for loving your kids. They need it, by design. And if you have a strained or absent relationship with your dad, take all the comfort in the world that we have a father who has not neglected us. The job of our earthly fathers has always been to introduce their children to their “real” dad. And as insufficient as your earthly father was, take comfort in the fact your “real” dad fathers perfectly. We are not victims. All of our trials are blessings. What an incredible opportunity to introduce people to their real father."
Thursday, June 11, 2009
June 10, 1950
I called my Dad yesterday morning on his and mother's 59th anniversary. I asked what he was doing for the day, and he laughed and simply said, "Oh, I have a little plan." My brother Dwight stopped by last night and talked to him. Here is his blog about Dad's day. Happy Anniversary, Dad. You and Mom are the best ever.
JUNE 10, 1950 (Dwight’s Blog, June 10, 2009)
Fifty-nine years ago today a man named Jim married a beautiful girl named Marie. That would be my father and mother. You probably have heard the saying, “They were made for each other.” Well, nothing could be truer of them.
They were very intentional on serving one another and considering the other’s interests above their own.
I have heard my dad say that he knew of no greater woman than my mom, including his own mom. That is quite a compliment for any woman. She was the apple of Dad’s eye, and Dad was the apple of her eye.
I stopped by today to see my dad . I asked him how it was going, and he said it had been a great day. He had worked all day. He said, “I have been listening to music and working. I have swept the floor, dusted the furniture, mopped the kitchen floor.” He said with a twinkle in his eye, “I did it just in case Mother would come back tonight.”
If you knew my mother, no one kept a house like her. It was her style. I know why Dad did what he did today. It was a way of showing honor to his wife, my mother, for all the years she took care of him.
Before I left he wanted me to listen to a favorite song:
I am going to a city,
Where the streets with gold are laid;
Where the tree of life is blooming,
And the roses never fade.
Here they bloom but for a season,
Soon their beauty is decayed;
I am going to a city,
Where the roses never fade.
Loved ones gone to be with Jesus,
In their robes of white arrayed;
Now are waiting for my coming,
Where the roses never fade.
Here they bloom but for a season,
Soon their beauty is decayed;
I am going to a city,
Where the roses never fade.
Here they bloom but for a season,
Soon their beauty is decayed;
I am going to a city,
Where the roses never fade.
Where the roses never fade!
I prayed with him and thanked him for the great example of a marriage that he and Mom had given me.
JUNE 10, 1950 (Dwight’s Blog, June 10, 2009)
Fifty-nine years ago today a man named Jim married a beautiful girl named Marie. That would be my father and mother. You probably have heard the saying, “They were made for each other.” Well, nothing could be truer of them.
They were very intentional on serving one another and considering the other’s interests above their own.
I have heard my dad say that he knew of no greater woman than my mom, including his own mom. That is quite a compliment for any woman. She was the apple of Dad’s eye, and Dad was the apple of her eye.
I stopped by today to see my dad . I asked him how it was going, and he said it had been a great day. He had worked all day. He said, “I have been listening to music and working. I have swept the floor, dusted the furniture, mopped the kitchen floor.” He said with a twinkle in his eye, “I did it just in case Mother would come back tonight.”
If you knew my mother, no one kept a house like her. It was her style. I know why Dad did what he did today. It was a way of showing honor to his wife, my mother, for all the years she took care of him.
Before I left he wanted me to listen to a favorite song:
I am going to a city,
Where the streets with gold are laid;
Where the tree of life is blooming,
And the roses never fade.
Here they bloom but for a season,
Soon their beauty is decayed;
I am going to a city,
Where the roses never fade.
Loved ones gone to be with Jesus,
In their robes of white arrayed;
Now are waiting for my coming,
Where the roses never fade.
Here they bloom but for a season,
Soon their beauty is decayed;
I am going to a city,
Where the roses never fade.
Here they bloom but for a season,
Soon their beauty is decayed;
I am going to a city,
Where the roses never fade.
Where the roses never fade!
I prayed with him and thanked him for the great example of a marriage that he and Mom had given me.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
SELF-LESSNESS and SACRIFICE
My father is a WWII Vet, 101st Airborne Division, US ARMY. He was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed, and jumped in Normandy on D-Day. He has the scars, the memories, and the Purple Heart to prove it. On May 30 he was invited to go on an HONOR FLIGHT for WWII vets, sponsored by a local VFW post, to Washington, DC to see the monuments, and experience the thrill of being in our capital city. 119 of them (30 in wheelchairs)and their volunteer escorts left Akron-Canton airport at about 6 a.m. for an unforgettable day. After a day of touring, they returned home at about 8:30. The reception to welcome them back was overwhelming for me---I can only imagine how it felt to them. The halls of the airport were lined with hundreds of people of all ages, cheering, waving flags, applauding...it was amazing. There were dozens of small children who had raised money through bake sales to sponsor the flight. There were Viet Nam vets (Rolling Thunder Motorcycle club), paying tribute and honor in a way they themselves did not receive. There were current members of the military, dressed in fatigues, blessing the acts of sacrifice that went before them.
In an extremely self-centered era, this whole experience was amazing. It celebrated self-less sacrifice--in the vets themselves, and in the people who came to honor them. These were not the great and mighty who have memorials built somewhere to individual acheivement. These were ordinary men who became often unnoticed heroes. And the people who gave up their evening (and actually gave up the Cavs game) to come give them a hero's welcome were heroes themselves. They made an incredible impact--one that was not noted by the world, but was forever recorded in the annals of unselfish living. It was unforgettable to me. I read a statement this week that sums up what I saw and experienced: "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." George Eliot in MIDDLEMARCH.
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