Reasons why I’m not thrilled about The Force Awakens

1)      Right out of the gate, the first thing that will be different is that it won’t start with Alfred Newman’s Fanfare (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DnpAQegDXE).  Yes, it’s 22 seconds of disappointment, but I’m scared of what they might replace it with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMyHnZ4lV54 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC-eFU6OgxA).  Did you know that George Lucas (not John Williams) brought Newman’s Fanfare back to 20^th Century fox in 1977?  It hadn’t been used in over 10 years.

2)      While we’re on the topic of music, Disney hasn’t released the soundtrack yet.  And the only tidbits that they showed on 60 minutes really didn’t relate to the original scores much at all.  I know that the music to the prequels was quite a bit different as well, but the beauty of Revenge of the Sith was how the music tied the prequel themes to the original trilogy.

3)      Also related to music, while I’m glad that they hired John Williams to do the music, they are using a Disney studio orchestra instead of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

4)       BB-8:  Let’s just say that I now understand everybody else’s hatred of Jar Jar  :)

5)      All of the other movies were released from May 16^th to May 25^th.  A December 17^th opening date just confirms that J. J. Abrams wasn’t paying any attention to details.

6)      There’s a character named Ello Asty – pronounced L-O S-T.  J. J. is more focused on self-promotion than the traditions of the saga.  (It’s minor, but how many other Abrams easter eggs are hidden in this movie?)

7)      A local concern:  All the good theaters are dead.  The Cooper and Century 21 have been gone for years.  The only good auditorium left in Denver for the Special Editions/Prequels was the Continental.  And now the Continental has been converted to stadium seating, and I just can’t bring myself to even go to see what it looks like.  I had a favorite seat at the Con – I sat in the same seat for all 6 of the Star Wars movies and the Lord of the Rings (and the extended editions).  I’m guessing that my seat is now about 12 feet below the stadium seat the proper distance from the screen.

8)      J. J. Abrams is known for not writing strong endings (Lost anyone?).  So why would Disney hire him to write the end of the greatest saga in movie history?

9)      Most of the people who are excited about the new movie are the same people who hated the prequels.  While I agree that there were things that I didn’t like about the prequels, the original trilogy wasn’t any better.  “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” isn’t any better than “I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.”  And Nien Nunb was worse than Boss Nass.  The Ewoks were just as silly as the Gungans.  And “It’s a trap!” became famous because it’s just as dumb as “Now this is podracing!”  Sorry folks, but the dialog and acting were not why we liked the original series.  It was the music and the great improvements in special effects. The prequels had better music and fantastic special effects if you were paying attention.  All that I have seen in the new movie is action, explosions, and I higher body count – which is the same thing that I’ve seen in every other movie coming out of Hollywood in the past 10 years.

In short, I’ll go, I’ll enjoy it, but there are just so many things that make this not a Star Wars movie.  Please don't screw it up Jar Jar Abrams.

The Priority of Corporate Prayer

              For the past couple of weeks, my church has been emphasizing prayer.  I appreciate the words that have been shared.  From things that I have been thinking about for several months and actually pet peeves that I have had for years, I would like to take the challenge just a little deeper.

              We have heard the importance of prayer.  We have heard about the beauty of being able to commune with our Creator.  We have discussed how much God wants to hear from us and how much he wants to heal our broken world.

              The struggle that I have with modern corporate prayer is the realization of how often it is used for transition.  We pray while the worship team quietly exits the stage.  We pray for the offering, not so much that God would bless our giving hearts and the resources he has blessed us with, but instead the prayer indicates to the ushers that they need to come forward so that we can take the offering.  We enter prayer times in our service so that the tech team can sneak onto the stage and fix technical glitches.  We offer up prayers that use special code phrases to indicate that we are skipping a song in the worship set.  So, we know about the importance and value of prayer, but the only times that we pray in our church services are scripted.

              I recently heard an interesting interview with the late Leonard Nimoy.  The point that stands out to me in the interview is his definition of why we close our eyes during prayer.  I have always been told that we close our eyes to help us focus, to close out the distractions around us.  According to Nimoy, the reason Jews are taught to close their eyes is because if the Shekinah glory of God showed up while the congregation was praying, they might die.  It really changes the focus not only of closing our eyes, but the focus of corporate prayer in general.

              As Christians, we know that God is always with us, and so we don’t anticipate anything greater happening during our services when we pray.  It is okay to move about the room to exit the stage or fix tech glitches because what is the worst that could happen if we didn’t?  We don’t expect God to really be present in our services, and so we expect very little.  Prayer helps the performance of our worship services to run more smoothly, so why not take advantage of it?

              Perhaps we should expect more of God.  Perhaps we should expect more of our corporate prayer.

The Funny Thing About Depression

               I have dealt with depression for most of my life.  I can’t say that anything ever started it, but there are seasons when things trigger and it is worse.  The thing that is interesting to me is that one of the things that usually raised me out of my sadness is the absolute humor of dealing with people as I deal with depression.  I really don’t think they know what they are doing.

              Two years ago, I hit one of my triggers.  It was interesting because it was one of the first times that I feel like anybody noticed naturally what I was going through.  The funny thing is that he handed me a flier about dealing with depression, said “If you need anything, please let me know,” and walked away.  I wanted to call after him, “No, I should be good.  I got this pamphlet.  Thanks!”

              A few months later, we had a short rash of suicides at the school that I work at.  Two of the students were from my classes.  (Again, one of my colleagues recognized that this might be affecting me specifically – so I did get a huge bucket of cookie dough out of it.)  Since the whole school was on heightened awareness, we got a district booklet.  There were lots of ideas in the booklet of warning signs to look for in depressed individuals.  I tried a few of them to see if anybody would actually notice:  For example I didn’t brush my hair or do any maintenance on my beard for 3 months.  When nobody seemed to notice, I decided to call it a failed experiment and went back to life as normal.

One of the other suggestions in the booklet that I thought was interesting was not to try to befriend a depressed person, but instead to inform social services personnel – I guess friendship with depressed people should be left to paid professionals.  We can’t allow depressed people to have unsupervised friendships.  Who knows what disastrous things could happen?

            Around this same time, Melinda Kathleen Reese started her beautiful mistranslation series called Google Translate Sings.  Her first song came at a very timely moment.  She took the lyrics of "Let It Go" and translated them into other languages and back to English, the result became the theme song of my life for at least a month - "Give Up."  Horrible timing for the message of the song, but it gave me more reasons to laugh.

              I think my favorite story from this particular period of my life is when I came across a spare length of rope.  It was pretty obvious who the rope belonged to, so I thought I would do him a favor and return the rope to him.  He said that he no longer had any need for the rope.  “You can keep it and use it for whatever you may need.”  Since he didn’t need it, I decided the best thing to do would be to throw it away.

              A few weeks later, Robin Williams died (suicide by belt - an option that I'd never before considered - thanks to the national news for adding that little detail).  It was interesting to see how people around me handled the situation and especially the things they said.  “How is it that somebody that is so happy and constantly bringing joy to other people could consider killing themselves?”  Sometimes depressed people use humor to keep themselves sane.  There are humorous things that happen every day.  Sometimes it’s the humor of depression that keeps us going.  Thanks for the laughs.

The Patriots

So, today is Super Bowl Sunday.  For the past three weeks, we have heard about “Deflategate.”  Lots of people have weighed in with their opinions on the events of the AFC Championship Game.  The biggest issue that I have with the discussion is how it magnifies our country’s relative morality.

The arguments that have been made are related to thing like:

1. They didn’t know there was such a rule.
2. Are you saying no other team in the league used under deflated footballs at all this season?
3. The only reason why people are upset is that they got caught.
4. Once the footballs were inflated to regulation PSI, the Patriots played better.  Imagine what the score would have been if they had used regulation footballs the entire game.
5. They might have broken this rule, but so many other teams use drugs.  So many other players beat their wives.  This is a non-issue really.
6. If you aren’t cheating, you’re not trying.

These arguments are extremely immature – I feel like I’m listening to a bunch of 7-year-olds talking about their neighborhood flag-football game.  These are adult professional football players.  They knew what they were doing – they may not have known the regulation PSI, but even I as one of the world least knowledgeable about the game knows there are rules about every aspect of the game.

Why have we not heard anybody say, “We’re sorry we played dishonestly.”  “We will work on our teams checks-and-balances and make sure this sort of oversight doesn’t happen again.”  “We’ll take a long hard look at our motivations.”

When our morality is based on the actions of people around us, we will always be able to find people who are worse than us.  And perhaps our own immorality will justify somebody else’s bad behavior somewhere else.  It is a downward spiral if we don’t acknowledge our faults and try to be better.

I think it’s sad that this isn’t just an issue with football.  It is an issue our whole nation deals with.  Politics.  Business.  Marriage.  Personal morality.  It seems that being immoral might just be what it means to be a Patriot – are we going to change that?