Tag Archives: church service

Cabaret

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Cabaret: (n) a nightclub or restaurant where entertainment is performed.

Even though life is not a cabaret, it also is not a church service.

It’s not a funeral.

It’s not a long wait at the DMV.

It’s not sitting in a doctor’s office.

It is not watching a second television show because you have nothing else to do.

It is not reading a book and thinking it’s just as good as traveling.

It is not a night out with the boys or one out with the girls.

It is not a political party.

It is not intolerance.

It is not going to your job and being miserable.

It is not going to your job and offering a lackluster performance.

It is not favoring your culture over another.

It is not thinking that you’re better than other people.

It is not owning anything (but a winning smile).

It is not selfishness.

It is not well-advertised bigotry.

It is not…

Well, I could go on. Let me change my original thought:

Life is a cabaret.

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Al fresco

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Al fresco: (adj) in the open air: e.g. an al fresco luncheon.

Much as I enjoy the arrival of spring with the promise of coming summer, and the warmth of that experience, I also become fully aware that I am about to be inundated by many different individuals who want to take advantage of the beauty of the season … to do everything outside.

Especially difficult for me is when they suggest that I take my sound equipment and music and array it on some sort of makeshift flat-bed trailer to perform in a park situation, surrounded by so many distractions that it’s nearly impossible to get the attention of a dead squirrel.

Let me tell you what bothers me about it:

1. Good sound needs walls. Otherwise it floats out and joins with other distracting molecules and becomes distorted or dispelled.

2. Even though I work very hard to be interesting, birds and trees, supersonic jets flying overhead and children briskly running and tripping to fall and scrape their noses do tend the eliminate the possibility of an ongoing attention span.

3. Bugs. If you are a normal person who showers, uses deodorant, or God forbid, aftershave, bugs seem to approach you as if you were a saloon and they are determined to get drunk on your elixir. I’ve had them fly in my mouth, buzz my bald head and perch themselves inside my ear.

I think I’ve just described the definition of “distracting.”

It happened to me recently when some friends invited me out to dinner, and asked if I wanted to sit at a table near the lake. It was a beautiful evening, about 6:15 P.M., and apparently the exact time when the local bees come out for an evening fellowship and what appeared to be church service. They huddled together, gathering around our food, and at times it appeared they were saying grace for the bounty set before them.

We eventually (being more intelligent than the buzzers) found ways to cover up our food, our bodies and the surrounding table with napkins, plates–and I think one lady used a scarf. It was not exactly what I would call a favorable dining experience.

I think going camping is an al fresco event. When you do so, you plan on roughing it, taking on nature and trying to get away from the delicacies of life.

But every other time you go al fresco, you must realize that it’s going to turn out to be a campout–and as soon as you arrive outside, you have departed your home … and entered Nature’s back yard. 

Accumulate

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Accumulate: (v.) to gather together or acquire an increasing number or quantity

It all comes down to what you’re gathering together.  In my mind, accumulation is associated with rain or snow. I guess one could accumulate great wealth.

But we rarely talk about accumulating intangibles. For instance, we don’t accumulate friends. We don’t really accumulate a sense of well-being.

Too bad. It’s not so much that the best things in life are free–it’s just that when we finally work our tails off to earn the things we think are best, we’re too exhausted to enjoy them.

So it’s really smart to accumulate things that don’t take a whole lot of effort, but instead, have a great pay-off. Matter of fact, it might be fun to tie a number to them. In other words:

  • Getting an ice cream cone at Burger King for fifty cents is a 3 in effort and a 10 in accumulation.
  • Working 40 hours a week at my job is a 10 in effort and a 3 in accumulation.
  • Sitting through a church service?? Well, that’s a toughie. I’m afraid that often it’s a 9 in effort and a 2 in accumulation.
  • Listening to a politician tout his or her programs–well, I think you get the idea.

We have found the secret to life, have we not? So how can I invest my daily bread of energy effectively to accumulate the better mixture of tangible holdings and intangible blessing? Quite frankly, we become grumpy if we have to work too hard to get so little.

You have to admire the heavens, which simply open up the clouds and dump whatever is available–hot OR cold. They don’t apologize or put forth extreme, strenuous effort. They just rain. They just snow. But in the meantime, we receive accumulation.

That’s what I want to be. Without coming across too weird or ethereal, if I could just be a cloud that floats along until it’s my time to dump my precipitation and then relax and let it flow–I would be happy.

Human life is too often spent determining what we want to do, fussing about it, arguing over it and planning it–only to be disappointed in the end at the turn-out. What if we flipped it? What if we put LESS effort in an attempt to get more results?

For when it’s all said and done, people will look back on our time of occupying terra firma and said, “What did they accumulate?”

If we make it look easy, we might encourage somebody to do more–instead of scaring them away from excellence.