Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Thursday, August 9th, 2018
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
Tuesday, June 5th, 2018Friday, December 8th, 2017
In the backyard of my childhood home in the Arkansas Delta is a forty foot pine tree. A few days before Christmas 1958, next to an in-ground concrete pond of mongrel fish bred from dime store gold fish and leftover fishing minnows, my Dad, who was not yet 30, planted three pine trees.
One died the following winter, during our neighborhood football game—heartlessly crushed under an eight-year-old Dallas Cowboys’ sneaker. Our yard man massacred another the next summer. But one still stands.
Many times since 1958 I visited that pine tree. Its deciduous beauty might inspire you, but it reminds me of my 49-year-old father in the last moments of his life gasping for breath, in mortal agony and pain. Terrible things happened to that man before he died. Things he did not deserve. While that hearty pine tree remains unscathed by beetle bug or rusty fungi.
Sticky, brown, ageless, unphased even by the coldest Arkansas winter, the pine tree still quietly stands, smirking and haughty. It was birthed 25 years after my dad was born and has lived 35 years after he died. It conflicts my soul because at a much too young an age I realized that there is mortal pain that obviates all notions of goodness.
Flaunting its immortality, the venerable tree postures itself in silent mockery of the rest of us who are struggling to deal with the many vicissitudes of life. I wish that pine was dead too. As it overshadows my old backyard, robbing all other life of light and sustenance, so also it overshadows me.
I see my simple, caring, innocent father, whose cosmology extended no farther than suppertime, kneeling and gently placing that ungrateful pine tree into the dark, rich Delta loam. Lovingly pouring water among its selfish, grasping roots, he squats in silent hopeful expectation. He thought he would see that tree tower above our farmhouse. Surely he did.
That tree gives me painful thoughts of what was and will never be again. What might have been but was not. What I want but cannot have. He never met three of my children. He will never know any of his great-grandchildren. I still ask him questions, “How do I do this?” Or “How did you feel when you did that?” I needed him. I really did. But he was not there.
He is not here when I need him now. Even today I reach for the phone to tell him something, to ask him something. Dad did not die a beautiful death. There was no Hallmark moment in that story. Dangling on a myriad of IV tubes, gasping for breath, he suffocated on his own fluids. As God or cancer or whatever it is that cruelly, slowly, torturously stole life from Dad, I similarly would like to kill that tree—slowly painfully stripping it of life until every evil, uncaring, nasty pine cone and needle joins my poor dad in his grave.
“But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, I bring you good News of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you…” (Luke 2:10)
The Christ child has come to give us life and hope! A Savior has been born to you…to those of us who wake up Christmas morning and nearly pick up a telephone to phone a deceased loved one to tell him/her about his/her grandchild’s first Christmas morning, this is good news.
To those of us who roll over Christmas morning and reach for an absent spouse, the angels bring good news indeed. To those of us who despair on Christmas Eve as we peer into the bright lights of our Christmas tree and only feel the absence of a loved one, the coming of the Christ child is real, much needed hope.
Let the ancient pine trees in our lives grow, and grow, and grow! We are not afraid. Someday I hope to show that old pine tree to my grandchildren, dad’s great-great grandchildren. To tell them about Christmas’s that once were and shall be again. About their great grandfather and great grandmother and all the faithful saints who loved Jesus Christ and are waiting for them in Heaven. Let the pine trees cover the sky! Let their arms reach beyond the world until they fill our souls, for, you see, we fear not. Our Savior has come.
Merry Christmas!
A BITTERSWEET THANKSGIVING PSALM
Thursday, November 23rd, 2017we were like those who dreamed.
2 Our mouths were filled with laughter,
our tongues with songs of joy.
Then it was said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.”
3 The Lord has done great things for us,
and we are filled with joy.
like streams in the Negev.
will reap with songs of joy.
6 Those who go out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with them.
Saturday, November 18th, 2017
Admission to competitive universities has been the subject of numerous movies, including Risky Business, Paper Chase, Love Story, and, a movie my wife Karen and I saw this weekend, Admissions. While I do not recommend any of the aforementioned movies (especially Risky Business), they often highlight some of the difficulties connected with college admission.
In the movie — starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd — Princeton University’s admissions office seems woefully behind the times when it comes to technology, with applicant records kept in folders (orange of course). Admission or rejection is accompanied by a dramatic checking of a box (or in one case where an admissions officer is angry at an applicant’s false claim, stamping the rejection twice on the folder). Princeton’s admissions dean (played by Wallace Shawn) is traumatized by a drop from No. 1 to No. 2 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings (when the only rankings indignity real-life Princeton suffers is being tied for the top spot with Harvard University).
Of course very few of us are going to go to Harvard or Princeton—although it is not as hard as you might think—both universities favor homeschool students and offer generous financial aid packages—but I want to highlight a few things I observed in the movie that are true.
- While I would never denigrate the ACT, it is not as prestigious a college admission exam as the SAT. Prestigious colleges prefer the SAT and ordinary/good colleges give larger financial aid packages to students who take the SAT and score high. My advice: Take both.
- Consider accumulating AP credits instead of CLEP credits. The former are far more prestigious. I still have openings in my AP classes. Visit http:www.forsuchatimeasthis.com and click on “Distance Learning.”
- If you opt to ignore the SAT and ACT—which is the only legitimate college admission test for the best colleges– and do something like College Plus, you jeopardize your financial possibilities and admission to prestigious graduate schools. Pray about it.
- College admission officers look at the essay portion of the ACT & SAT in lieu or in addition to the college admission essay. You should really, then, give a lot of attention to both.
- Choose the 5 colleges you would attend and apply. I recommend having 2 “long shot” choices, 2 “possible,” and two “in the bag” choices. Visit all 5 if you can. Arrange for interviews.
- Do not think about financial aid until you are accepted. Apply to a college—any college you feel God is calling you to—and then apply for financial aid if you are accepted. NEVER pay an independent agency to find financial aid or scholarships for you. The admitting college will help you gratis.
- Know the difference between early action & early decision. Early decision plans are binding — a student who is accepted as an ED applicant must attend the college. Early action plans are nonbinding — students receive an early response to their application but do not have to commit to the college until the normal reply date of May 1. Therefore, apply to one early decision school and many other (5?) early action schools. After all, early action/early decision applicants have a much better chance to be accepted and to receive scholarships than regular admission students.
If you find the above insights helpful, feel free to visit www.forsuchatimeasthis.com. Consider inviting me to conduct an SAT/ACT/College Admission Seminar for your COOP, school, or group. SAT/ACT Seminar. I will conduct an ACT/SAT seminar for you at a time that meets your schedule. Since I am a grader for the SAT many new insights are fresh in my mind. I will administrate a real SAT /ACT, evaluate the SAT/ACT score, and offer specific test-taking strategies. Parents attend the seminar free! Contact me directly if you are interested, jpstobaugh@alumni.harvard.edu or 814 479 7710.
I am also presenting a college admission workshop on Outschool.com. I would love to have you join me!
Tuesday, November 14th, 2017
By the time that you read this blog, I will have evaluated over 1500 SAT essays. I personally evaluated 2-3% of all the October essays. I am a fast and, I wish, a more accurate grader. I am paid per hour according to accuracy and productivity. So you should listen to me! My advice is not based on online wisdom or hypothetical anecdotes – I do the real thing!
I work for Pearsons/CollegeBoard and evaluate SAT essays for them. English teachers with attitude all over America are grabbing a cup of tea and trying their best to evaluate what is, by all estimations, a very subjective assignment.
The SAT and ACT, college admission tests, are approximately three hours long—three hours and fifty minutes if you write the optional essay. The essay portion is given at the beginning of the test. The score is factored into the writing section.
The SAT and the ACT essay are critical components of the college admission portfolio and students ignore them at their own risk.
For one thing, it is no small comfort to admission officers to see that students can actually write and, at the same time, SAT/ACT essays allow students to showcase their writing skills.
At the same time, many colleges purchase SAT/ACT essays as an addendum to the anxiety ridden college application essay. In other words, not trusting students to submit an honest, clean appraisal of their writing abilities in 650 words, colleges revert to using the spontaneous SAT/ACT essay. After all, colleges can be certain that no one assisted students in these creations!
Therefore, the SAT/ACT essay is critical. Students, you simply must take it.
Each SAT Essay consists of one passage between 650 and 750 words that you will read and then respond to. You will have 50 minutes to complete the SAT Essay.
The purpose of the new SAT Essay is to assess your ability to analyze an author’s argument. It is not merely a paraphrase of his/her argument. To write a strong essay, you will need to focus on how the author uses evidence, reasoning, and other rhetorical techniques to build an argument and make it convincing. Three components are evaluated: Reading, Analysis, and Writing. A perfect score is 4 plus 4 plus 4, or 12 times 2 (since there are two different graders), or 24 total.
The essay task will be the same in every test. What will change is the reading selection you’ll be asked to analyze. If you are familiar with the Essay prompt ahead of time – and understand exactly what your task is – you will save time on Test Day and write a stronger essay.
If you are interested in talking more about the SAT/ACT essay join me for an online webinar/discussion @ 1PM EST, Tuesday, November 28, 2017, e-mail jpstobaugh@alumni.harvard.edu for an invitation. During this webinar I will give you more specific writing strategies and I will be available to answer any of your other questions.
Know the Time
Monday, October 23rd, 2017Come,” they say, “let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more” (Ps 83:4). When Karen and I (mostly Karen) began homeschooling in the 1980s, we did not much think about grand things. We mostly simply wanted to arrive on time to mid-week church just one time. That was particularly embarrassing since I was the pastor and leader of the Bible study. Just once. Never happened.
Yet, in the midst of controlled chaos (that you all know so well), there was a sonorous hope that empowered us. We were doing the right thing, we knew it, teaching our children. We were making a difference. Those were the days!
In retrospect, we were living the end of an age. Camelot was disappearing. The end of the Christian era. The post-Christian era was about to begin.
Know the time!
When our children were younger we raised 4-H Suffolk sheep. Sturdy fences surrounded 10 acres of alfalfa pasture and bubbling spring water. With maximum temperatures of 80 degrees in the summer, Suffolk Sheep frolicked and procreated with security and joy. However, in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania, like so many other places, nefarious coyotes, even inquisitive black bears, and packs of wild dogs wandered down from distant woodlands and meadows. An old shepherd warned us, “The fences are not to keep the sheep in but to keep the critters out.” He was right. Angry, ravenous predators lurked outside our green pastures. Electric fence reinforced with barbed wire keep predators out and helpless sheep in.
In case you haven’t noticed, the fences are down. The enemy is rallying against the People of God.
I do not fear though. And either should you! He is more than able to defeat our enemies! “Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready” (Rev 19:7). “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev 21:2).
Know the time!
The Kingdom of God will always be a place of conflict in the world. In the long run, it is really no contest at all.
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)
Your children, all of us, will not merely survive, exist. We shall take back what is rightfully His. We shall be more than conquerors in Christ Jesus!
Your students will infiltrate the university, the courthouse, the government building, the world. Cleverly disguised as lawyers, physicians, university professors, engineers these dynamic young Christians—your children—will turn the tide of history. I know it.
In summary, there has been a season of peace for followers of Christ in the western, European and Asian world. But know that a season of persecution is to come. The fences are down. “However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name” (1 Peter 4:16-17).
What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31-37)
Know the time!
The Giver
Saturday, September 30th, 2017The Giver is a 1993 American young adult dystopian novel by Lois Lowry. The society has eliminated pain and strife by converting to “Sameness”, a plan that has also eradicated imagination. The Community lacks any color, memory, climate, or terrain, all in an effort to preserve structure, order, and a true sense of equality beyond personal individuality.
As I prepare for my World Communion sermon tomorrow (October 1) it feels like I serve in a colorless, memoryless world, that has forgotten who it is, and, therefore what it must do. I find myself serving communion to a world, and, to a lesser extent, a congregation, that is modest in its expectations, limited in its energy, tentative in its hope. In other words, we lack any color, memory, climate, or terrain, all in an effort to preserve structure, order, and a true sense of equality beyond personal individuality.
Therefore, as I prepare my pastoral sermon, I realize that, tomorrow at least, I will need to be a prophet, not a pastor:
“The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
Our world has lost hope because they cannot imagine a different world from the dystopian world in which they imagine they live. They live in a world of sameness where hope is an aberration because they cannot imagine a world any different from their world. It would be absurd to do so. It would be fanciful to do so. “Hope, on one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretensions of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question. . .”
So what I intend to do tomorrow is to put on my prophetic hat and offer an alternative reality. I will make the bold claim that Christ is the Giver. This bold assertion will be difficult for my congregation to accept. We are upper middle-class Presbyterians; we are the givers. But if this thing is going to work tomorrow, this communion-thing, it really has to be the Lord’s Supper and He alone is the Giver. We have to accept His grace. We have to stand again at the foot of the cross and accept the gift we could not earn, did not deserve, but is given to us anyway. “The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.”
Tomorrow, then, we gather to blow the hopelessness of the world apart! We will make claims that are powered by the imagination. We dare to hope that we can change, indeed, that our whole world can change. We will begin with the astounding truth that our God loves us, our Savior died for us, our Holy Spirit empowers us. We will color our world with hope. We will leave that place tomorrow with renewed expectation. Bold assertions. Bold hope. A new tomorrow! Let us begin . . . “On the night that our Lord was betrayed . . . He took bread.”
AN ONTOLOGICAL DILEMMA
Friday, September 29th, 2017At a church meeting/breakfast this morning I was faced with an ontological dilemma: what do I order for breakfast?
I am being trite, even disrespectful you think. Well, listen . . .
I am on a diet. Really. The kind of diet that disallows all carbohydrates. Potatoes, toast (even, healthy whole grain toast), and everything sweet, are history!
Which is why I faced an ontological (relating to the basic nature of things, beginnings) dilemma this morning.
The first crisis: I could do what I liked. My surrogate conscience (my wife Karen) was absent. I knew full well that my church comrades would willingly, with no judgment attached, join me as co-conspirators. It is a confession of faith among Presbyterian men, indeed, the eleventh commandment, “thy shall not tell thy brother’s wife what thee and thy comrade ate at the men’s breakfast.” Oh we don’t lie but half-truths have evolved into a perfidious science. When asked what we ate we respond, “Oh it was health” or “It was not as bad as usual.” And then we quickly change the subject, “Honey, your hair looks beautiful today” or something like it. I hope my readers will appreciate my raw honesty, and will not, ontologically, condemn me. So I could have sinned today and eaten what I liked . . . but I didn’t. I will tell you why I didn’t in a minute.
The second crisis: my brother-in-Christ Jeff, who is not on a diet, ordered a double hash brown order “to make up, Pastor, for what you are not eating.” Of course, Jeff was doing no such thing—eating my portion to make up for what I was not eating—he was being mean. Spiteful. Disrespectful. Ontologically, he forgot my high and lofty role in his church! For a few moments I wished to be an Episcopalian or Roman Catholic priest, full of hierarchical power, but, alas, I was captured by a dilemma: I thoroughly embrace the notion of the “priesthood of all believers” so Jeff, fortuitously, escaped clergy wrath and I smiled and with great frustration sprinkled more hot sauce on my unappetizing American cheese omelet.
The last crisis: in the midst of a plethora of choices—indeed, my life is normally full of choices—500 plus television choices, 18 different menu items—Belgian waffles, blueberry pancakes, Texas toast sandwich—sigh, I now had one choice: Eggs and bacon or sausage. And I was not enjoying the feeling.
So I ate my breakfast, without sin and guile. I did so with a smile and joy in my heart (sort of). I will take my ½ pound of weight loss this week and smile. I do it to please my wife, to improve my health, etc. But I also do it for love.
And here is the point of this blog—eating this breakfast is sort of like my walk of faith. I do it because I love God and I want to please Him and I want to . . . well that is about it: I love Him. I do not wish to trivialize the grace of God by suggesting it is remotely related to my diet—but human motivation, in the face of so many choices, in the face of so much temptation, when push comes to shove, comes down to love. Not fear. Not manipulation. But love. God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son—That is pretty well the reason I obey God’s commandments. He will love me anyway—I do not embrace a performance-based religion—my Savior died on the cross for my sins because He loved me and willingly chose to do it.
So think of these ontological things . . . and pass the hot sauce. . .