Things That Made Me Smile This Week

The past week has not been one of my favorite seven days.

Some historian/minister somewhere, (I actually am so tired of this kind of crap that I hardly read the piece) now claims that Jesus Christ was a construction of the Roman Empire's imagination, invented to distract the Jews from violence against the Empire.

Then there was an article debunking King David of the Old Testament as a war monger conqueror who basically used force to combine Israel and Judah and that is why we have the modern Jewish state and the almost universal support by the Jewish people of Israel.

Then there where the endless articles and talk shows regurgitating the ongoing lies and posturing of Congress and the President as each side tried to make the other seem like the villain in the current fiscal crisis which frankly is simply the latest expression of the greed and ignorance of those we continue to elect to run the government.

I watched the entertainment industry press continue to condemn Miley Cyrus and are now all her "haters" for doing what in my opinion Cher, Madonna, Lady Gaga, hell even, Tina Turner did in their day, i.e. use sex to sell records. Miley just seemed to do it better. I mean a world wide number 1 song two weeks after shaking her butt and sticking her tongue out of the side of her mouth on an awards show designed to feature the outrageous.

And finally while rereading one of my favorite books "Fly Fishing through the Midlife Crisis" by author Howell Raines, I came across an old article from the early nineties that basically called Raines everything from a "liar" to an "egotist" to a "fraud". 

Plus Michigan lost to Penn State on Saturday. I mean how sad was that.

So, today, a Sunday, I decided to ignore all social media, all news outlets, all reporters, and all scholars, and other sundry and prolific pundits be they, sports commentator's acting like they know something the rest of us don't, be they comedians acting as political commentator's or be they political pundits who are so stupid as to even make bad comedians. 

Seriously, I ignored every freaking expert out there. Did not look at CNN or FOX or HBO or read a paper or pick up a new book exposing someone or something, or doing some form of revisionism. 

Instead I went for a long hike early in the morning, stopped and watched sea gulls fly "en masse" seeking scraps from happy looking tourists, watched two jack rabbits running like crazy across a field and drove a few hundred miles and just thought. 

It has been a while since I just thought. 

And I thought about things that made me happy, like how lucky I am to still be alive and pretty healthy for my age. And that made me smile.

I smiled at the thought of the young female alligator Stephen caught out of pond six on the site and we put on a sanctuary earlier this week. 

Not many people would  "save" an alligator but to me she is one of God's creatures, as surely as we are. That made me smile.

And I smiled and remembered I used to like "Hannah Montana" and I that I still like Miley Cyrus and her new music, as much (or more) then I used to like Cher and Madonna, etc.

I smiled with the realization that I lost all respect for all politicians decades ago, which probably does not say very much positive about me. But it made me smile anyway.

I remembered what I think was Mark Twain's or maybe Will Roger's famous comment that "Congress was the only true criminal class in America". 

True then, truer now. And I smiled.

And I smiled even more when I thought about how for 2,000 years plus, countless individuals and institutions have tried to tear down Jesus Christ and he just emerges stronger and purer and a more remarkable proof of God's existence than we as humans can or will ever grasp while we are on this earth.

And I thought, regardless of Howell Raines perfections or imperfections Chapter 9 "The Black Dog" in his book on "Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis" just may be the most honest and lucid explanation of why and how men fear and react to age, mortality, and death ever written. 

And for that alone Howell Raines deserves our gratitude and appreciation. And again thinking of that single chapter made me smile. 

I smiled when I recalled that even in the Old Testament no one ever said King David was perfect, he was a human being. 

That is the whole point of Jesus, we are so flawed without him we really have no chance of something better after this life ends. That really made me smile.

And I thought if you want to buy in to the views of all the pseudo-genius's, who think they have all the answers of how the universe began (it just appeared out of nothing aka "The Big Bang"), what the universe is comprised of ( strings, particles, energy, or something), etc., that do not believe anything exists for us after this life ends, then there isn't anything to look forward to regardless. 

That made me smile and actually laugh out loud.

So, at the end of the day as I pulled my truck back into the parking lot and saw Lori in her wheelchair laughing and playing with one of the poodles despite the cancer demon she is fighting, I smiled yet again.

As I walked into the house my cell phone beeped and I looked down and saw a text from a friend who went to Penn State. That did not make me smile. 

Hey, nothing is 100%.