Tag Archives: guide

Conscience

Conscience: (n) an inner guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior.

I am discovering that my mind has become a garage, where I store all the memories and stuff that can no longer be used–simply because most of them are more than twenty years old.

Therefore, they are viewed as useless.

If you don’t believe me, just bring up something from the 1980’s, and look at the confused, frustrated and sometimes angry faces of the young humans around funny wisdom on words that begin with a C
you, who don’t understand that you forgot that “they weren’t born yet.”

So I have to be careful as I mention Jimminy Cricket. I do so because when I think of the word “conscience,” he is the pesky insect that comes to mind. He insisted that we should let our “conscience be our guide.”

Well, it doesn’t take me long driving down the freeway to notice that if the conscience actually does exist, it has not been evenly distributed. There are people who are courteous, and there are folks who only got the first part of the word: curt.

So I have to ask the little cricket if he could help me understand whether this conscience thing was there at birth, or if somebody didn’t need to hover over all living souls to make sure that they grew up giving a shit about anything but themselves.

Having raised a number of children, I can tell you that they do not arrive on Earth as human beings. They are actually more of a confirmation of Darwin’s theory of evolution–they are little monkeys who scream, wiggle, piss, poop and grab for everything in sight, until they are trained to escape a life in the jungle, and can be welcomed to Suburbia.

A conscience is not something we’re born with. It’s something we are taught–and hopefully taught so well that we retain it once we are no longer able to be sent to our rooms.

 

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Bishop

Bishop: (n) a senior member of the Christian clergy

Dictionary B Fathering six sons, I was always torn, trying to discover what profile was best for their well-being.

After all, being a parent is not strutting your stuff in front of fellow-parents, but instead, doing as little as possible to gain as much as possible, while allowing your children the freedom to experiment without killing themselves.

As awkward as the previous sentence may seem, the process has an even greater clumsiness.

Three words:

  • Guide
  • Lead
  • Control

In many ways, the same thing is true in discovering the purpose of leadership in a church–taking the title of Bishop and finding the correct balance for “bishoping.”

After all, guiding is setting a course for your own life and allowing the sweet aura of joy and peace that surrounds your efforts to draw others in the direction of your belief and pursuit.

Leading is when you motion to them to follow your aspirations and adhere to your principles.

Controlling is when you remove part of their freewill because you fear that their choices will lead them astray.

If the wrong decision is made, you can translate what was meant to be holy into something that is wholly unacceptable.

We guide by doing more than by talking.

We lead by talking without demanding.

And we control by demanding and enforcing.

Sooner or later, the bishops of the church will have to trust the congregation to pursue the path of goodness by choice instead of intimidation.

It will be a frightening process, speckled with error from misguided trial, but still will end up producing the true fruit of the spirit instead of forced compliance to the rigid law.

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Bazaar

Bazaar: (n) a market in a Middle Eastern country.Dictionary B

I often comfort myself with the knowledge that if I didn’t do dumb things, I wouldn’t have great stories to tell.

So a certain amount of imperfection, idiocy and clumsiness is necessary to fall under the classification of “a good writer.” (At least, that’s my take and I’m stickin’ with it.)

Many years ago, I traveled to Haiti, and being a novice at such a journey, I didn’t take enough money. After I paid all the taxes, tariffs and incidentals, I ended up with 72 cents in loose change to last me for two weeks.

My lodging was covered and so were my meals, but I didn’t have any personal money.

One of my guides on suggested that we go to the local street market, or bazaar, to see what the Haitians had put together through their creativity.

I don’t know why, but it didn’t even occur to me that these artisans might just want to sell their wares to hapless Americans. I wasn’t in the bazaar for more than thirty seconds before I was completely surrounded by determined individuals trying to sell me what they had built, cooked or grown.

The stuff was beautiful.

They were great salespeople.

But you see–I only had 72 cents.

To the average Haitian, any white man from America is independently wealthy and probably arrived on their shores in a yacht.

So using a word of Creole here and there, I tried to explain that I had no money. This only encouraged them to sell harder, assuming that they were just one catch-phrase away from garnering my business.

They also kept dropping their prices.

Finally, after about five or six arduous minutes of grueling exchange, I pulled out fifty cents and bought a lovely, carved statue. The person who did the work probably took at least four hours to make it, and I felt like a real jerk.

But they were delighted to get the fifty cents, and I intelligently escaped quickly out the back exit from my experience … at the bizarre bazaar,

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