Here is a blog entry that my husband wrote on our church blog. I'm including it here in it entirety because I agree with it and I like him :)
Imagine for a moment that you are driving along a busy highway. Without warning, a vehicle a short distance in front of you spins out of control. Despite your best efforts, you and a number of other vehicles around you are involved in the resulting crash. Due to where you were in relation to the other vehicles, you survive the accident completely unhurt and with only minor damage to your vehicle. However as you overcome your shock and look around, you notice that one of the vehicles involved in the accident was a motorcycle. The motorcycle appears to have been caught between two large cars that were also involved in the crash. The motorcycle rider lies bleeding and unconscious several metres from the seriously damaged motorcycle. As well, you notice that the driver of the vehicle that originally spun out of control is slumped over his steering wheel, seemingly unconscious. You see that several other drivers appear to have been injured also. As you climb out of your car to see what you can do to help, a close friend who is a paramedic runs up. Your friend had fortunately been driving by when the accident occurred. Surprised to see you, your friend runs over to see if you are injured. You quickly reassure him that, besides being a bit shaken up, you are fine. Your friend tells you that since you are obviously under considerable stress, he would like you to sit down so that he can give you a back massage. As you get over your initial shock at such a suggestion, you hurriedly point out the badly injured motorcyclist, the unconscious driver and the other injured people at the accident scene. However, your friend tells you that although the other people at the scene obviously need his help, he is primarily concerned with helping you since you are his close friend and he doesn't even know these other people.
Although this situation seems absurd and it is hard to imagine something like this ever happening, this is essentially how most people in Western nations celebrate Christmas. Despite the fact that countless people around the world are in desperate need of help, most people choose to give lavish and usually unnecessary gifts to their close friends and family instead of helping those who really need gifts.
Jesus gave himself as a gift we can not repay to meet our greatest need. It is sadly ironic that so many celebrate his birth by giving unneeded gifts to those who can easily repay the kindness.
He said also to the man who had invited him, "When you host a dinner or a banquet, don't invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors so you can be invited by them in return and get repaid. But when you host an elaborate meal, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Then you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." -Jesus (Luke 14:12-14, NET)
I've recently come to believe that our society is over-educated in some areas and grossly under-educated in other areas. Let me explain. As I mentioned in my previous post I've been learning a lot of domestic skills lately. This made me think about how dependent I was and our society is on businesses and companies to produce the things that we need. Until I knew how to preserve foods I was dependent on companies to do it for me and to supply me with food for the winter. Before I knew how to sew I was dependent on stores to sell clothing. I realize now how under-educated our society is in some of these basic survival skills. This leaves us in a very weak position should we face a large disaster.
While we're under-educated in this area I think that we're over-educated in academic areas. I went to school for 15 years (2 years post secondary + k-12). What skills do I still use? Well, basic math, reading and writing. I also have a lot of useless factual knowledge buried in my brain. I know that some of my education has helped me be able to think more clearly but I don't think I needed to spend as much time as I did studying to get to the place that I'm at. If I hadn't spent so much time learning useless things I could have learned more practical life skills from my mother. Schools are so driven towards heavy academics. They assume that everyone should strive towards degrees and academics after high school but this is simply not true.
I think that these conditions leave us in a bad position as a society. Not only are we at risk if a disaster occurs but it also affects families. When girls are encouraged through their childhood and teens years to go into academics many of them feel like they have to in order to be successful. Life skills are consequently undervalued. When they start to have families a lot of these woman don't know what to do with themselves and then feel useless. Consequently, a lot of them will look to work for fulfillment and this will affect their family. I don't think it matters if they got through a degree or not. Educated woman as well as less educated woman are trained to think that work is necessary to be useful. Please don't think that I'm saying that woman should stay out of academics. Some woman, especially single or childless woman, may be very happy and useful in these fields.
The push for academics can also have a negative impact on men. Some men are not going to succeed in academics. If they don't succeed school they may feel useless. Trades are also undervalued. This will also have a negative effect on their families.
I've also seen people get absorbed in less then useful education. People spend years working on philosophy or sociology degrees with no idea of what their end goal is. Surely they could be doing something better with their time and money. Why is this considered a respectable thing to do? What I'm trying to get across is that people should be more willing to be happy and respected with out a lot of education.
Since I haven't done much blogging lately I thought I had better catch up and fill you in on a little of what's been going on in my life. Nothing very interesting but maybe it'll give you a bit better idea of who I am and what I'm like.
A couple of weeks ago my grandmother died. Don't worry about me; I didn't know her so I didn't feel any grief. Anyways, my mother flew into Vancouver from Winnipeg and my sister and her fiance drove over from Courtenay (a small town on Vancouver island) and we all drove together to Kelowna (a city 5 hours from Vancouver) for the funeral. It was really nice to be able to spend some time with mom and sister and to meet her fiance. The funeral, though, was really terrible. The minister kept making references to my grandmother being in heaven even though she was not a Christian. While no one knows for sure where her heart was I found it totally offensive that the minister was willing to lead people to believe that she was most certainly in heaven. He read a bunch of scripture out of context to try to prove this. My aunts were also reassuring my grieving sister that "Nana's dancing now. There's no need to be sad". I was crying with frustration but everyone but my mom thought that I was grieving. The following day at the entombment of the ashes my mom, her sisters, my sister, her fiance and I gathered together to put the ashes into a tomb. One of my aunt suggested we say a prayer together. The prayer started out fine but degenerated quickly. My aunts were praying about how heaven wouldn't be the same now that their mom was there. One of the them then piped in "And for God's sake don't let her drive". In a prayer, who do they think they're talking to?! They then started praying to my grandmother which made me feel very uncomfortable. In retrospect I wished I had stepped aside at that point. They would have just thought that I was grieving. I feel a bit like I endorsed their inappropriate prayers by remaining the circle. It's over now. I think that what I'm frustrated with is that I didn't get much of a chance to speak the truth. I just got a clear picture of how deceived my family really is.
Since Christmas I've been working on a few domestic projects. I'm trying to learn how to make sourdough bread. I'm attempting to make it with wild yeast like the people in the olden days did. Basically you let some flour and water ferment for a few days and then use that in the bread dough. During the fermentation process yeast multiply and are then able to rise the dough. I've also just picked up knitting. I'm making a scarf for practice but eventually I want to be able make socks. This, by the way, has nothing to do with the fact that knitting is trendy these days. I've wanted to be able to knit for eons and I'm a competent crocheter and have been for awhile. I'm also learning to sew. I got a sewing machine for $3 dollars at a garage sale a couple years ago and replaced a part. I just sat down with it a couple of days ago to figure it out. I've had a stack of mending to do for quite awhile so it was nice to get through that stuff. I'm also getting really excited about spring gardening. The bulbs are up (in my to be herb garden unfortunately) but every nice day so far I've been busy. I'll bore you with the details some other time.
My upcoming project is that I plan to develop a website along the lines of instructions in how to live an extremely frugal life. There are plenty of sites devoted to frugality but I intend mine to be different in that I'm assuming that people only want to use resources on things that are absolutely necessary. That means no info on frugal entertainment (maybe free entertainment but that's far down my list of things to add). In case you're new to my blog let me explain a philosophy that I try to live by. My goal is to waste as little of the resources God has given me as possible so that I might be able to use what is left over for his kingdom. Along the lines of "seeking first the kingdom of God". I'll let you know when I've a got a beta site ready.
I'm sorry folks if you read my blog and are annoyed that I just seemed to disappear for awhile. I took a break because I need to re-evaluate my blog and decide if it was worth continuing. I sort of felt like I had run out of stuff to say and got a little obsessed with my site stats. I'm hearby restarting my blog but this time I'm going to just write about what I'm feeling and try my best not to care about how many people are reading my blog (within reason). I'm going to try to respond to some of the comments that people have left recently. Sorry again for ignoring you.