About halfway through the film Broken English:

“What are you thinking?”

Nora is laying her head back on Julian’s chest. The bath suds cover their nakedness. His arms intertwine with hers and wrap around her torso. He waits for a response, but she simply stares into space from behind blank eyes.

“Hey.” He splashes some water on her.

They have just made passionate love, and they were happy. She was happy. And if her pattern holds, the happiness will soon reach its abrupt end.

According to Jake Shimabukuro, “It’s the instrument of peace, because if everyone played the ukulele, this world would be a much happier place.”

He said that at TED in February 2010, in the performance that kicks off today’s concert.

And then he set out to prove it by playing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the whole thing, solo, on his ukulele.

Last week, I drove my daughter’s iPad down to her at to school.

One of the Blue Shirts there in the parking lot approached me and asked what I was doing, and told me, “we get a little concerned,” because I was waiting there for her. I figured, as soon as he realized I was a parent who had a legitimate reason to be at the school, that would be the end of the conflict. But during our short conversation, he repeated this line several times, “we get a little concerned.”

I said, “Sorry about that.” But what I was thinking was, “‘Concern’ on your part does not translate to a demand on mine.”

And maybe if I were a bigger asshole, I would have said, “Well, I’m sorry you feel concerned. Maybe if I bring you some milk and cookies next time, you’ll feel better. Would you like that?”

Monday is Rosh Hashanah, so no blogging then. (I don’t expect to be online.) However, I wanted to mention a brief but important thought before the holiday begins.

Rosh Hashanah, one of the major Jewish holidays, kicks off the 10 Days of Repentance (also called the Days of Awe). During this time, from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, one focuses on how he has been selfish and self-seeking, how he has hurt others, how he has manipulated and coerced in order to benefit at others’ expense. And he acts to seek forgiveness and to right these wrongs. We search our souls during this time, and on Yom Kippur lay them bare before God, because as Rabbi Hama ben Hanina taught, “Great is repentance, for it brings healing to the world.”

During this time of soul-introspection, I want to ask: What are you selling?

I ran into this on Facebook, or Twitter, or some site or another. It’s been making the rounds, I guess.

“It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.”

Of course, with a healthy dose of skepticism, the first thing I did was to research how much was involved in getting a plastic spoon to my dining room table, compared to what was involved in doing the dishes. A plastic spoon costs about 2¢. Washing a steel spoon, even if I paid someone to do it, is still cheaper.

(I’m sure that’s one reason why most people use plastic spoons only on rare occasions. The other reason is that plastic spoons are chintzy, and break in two pieces, and feel funny in your mouth, and generally just kinda suck.)

But 2¢ is still pretty damn amazing. Think about that for a moment, how many steps and how much transportation goes into producing plastic spoon and getting it to your table. And all of that for less than the price of two serious thoughts. Sheesh! It pays for half of itself just by me thinking about it!

Think about the implications!

Apparently this week’s most favorite misunderstood bible quote, I’ve run into it multiple times recently, from multiple sources:

I can do everything through him who gives me strength.

(Philippians 4:13 NIV)

What an empowering thought. Isn’t it great that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to, through God’s strength? Bzzt. Wrong! What Paul is talking about here involves much more depth, a much more profound message.

In uncertain times such as these, we seek to be empowered. Because with power comes control and certainty. World and national events sometimes make us feel as though life is slipping away from us. Wars on one side, injustice on the other, and economic tornadoes touching down right over our heads. We fear for our lives, our families, and our communities, and we may even feel these slipping away from us. And we react, as all humans do, to reassert ourselves over our environment, to try to maintain personal empowerment in the midst of circumstances we have no control over.

Note: This post is an extended version of the comments I made at church a couple weeks ago.

Many of us have heard of the “peace that transcends all understanding,” from one of the most famous snippets of the New Testament: “and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds…” (Philippians 4:7)

But I don’t know that we have a realistic conception of what that “peace” is. It’s not “peace and quiet,” as we often think in English. Not an inner calm, well not directly, anyhow. It can overlap with “peace and quiet,” because if you’re at peace, you’re not in turmoil. But most of the time in the Bible, when you read “peace,” it usually refers to something slightly different than “peace and quiet.”

The words of the chorus are based on an old Hebrew prayer: Establish peace, goodness, and blessing, grace and kindness and compassion, upon us and upon all Israel, your people.

He turned it into a song for peace for the world:

I wasn’t going to put up another blog post today, but this little tidbit about friendships blew me away. And so I had to post it, and I had to post it now, and this is the right place to post it, so here it is. Even if you’re not religious, I hope you find this uplifting.