Jeffrey C. Long

It’s been around 3 weeks since I started teaching elementary music. The greatest challenge is that I have to make music accessible to the broadest range of ages imaginable. Today I taught kindergarteners, 4th, 5th and 6th graders. Tomorrow I will add 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders to the mix. Each age has its own unique characteristics. So I not only have to plan lessons around their uniqueness I also have to be able to relate to them personally and as an educator. I’ve had days of feeling really successful and at least one day when I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing.

But I have to say that the moments that make it all worthwhile are when I work with the youngest kids… the kindergarteners and 1st graders, and the special needs kids. Watching their excitement as they _get_ to play a shaker or bells. Seeing the joy in their eyes as I play the music they “wrote” by putting their M and M’s on a staff. You would think that in ministry you would have the satisfaction of knowing that you were changing lives. But the older people get the more they keep their cards close to their chest. I never felt like I was making a difference in the lives of the people I served for the last 2 and a half years. I honestly don’t know what they needed or if they needed anything at all. But today when I was marching around the room with 20 kindergartneres behind me singing “Bow bow bow belinda” I knew that I was bringing joy to these kids. It’s nice to be making a difference again.

Moving to Nampa forced me to make some media decisions. Our family has two homes now, one in Twin Falls and one in Nampa which means twice the bills. Fortunately all my utilities are paid for here, ‘cept for electricity and I hardly use any. But for the last two and a half years I’ve been spoiled with 200 channels of television and a DVR on Dish Network and wireless internet. Moving to Nampa I knew I couldn’t afford both so I chose internet. So I am now living a TV-free life.

This is really a forced, though fun experiment for me. Before you get all misty for me missing Grey’s Anatomy, Heroes and Numbers, realize that the networks make these shows available online to watch for free. Mind you the video is kinda crappy, there are still commercials and I have to wait the next day to watch the episodes my family watched the night before. And I moved the family’s Netflix account to my Nampa home. Really the only thing that I can’t watch legally for free is my scifi channel shows like Battlestar Galactica and Stargate Atlantis. For those I’ll rely on bittorrent which will involve a little more work and hard drive space. So really, I have just as much media opportunities as I had with Dish.

So, can I live without cable? Without rabbit ears? Yes. Could my family? Maybe. If we had a media computer like a Mac mini hooked up to the TV we could get by with our prime time shows online. The kids would have to watch cartoons and Disney programs on Netflix. So who knows… might have to try. In the meantime, I’m getting along just fine for those of you who were worried. <wink>

Wanted to let all of you know who have been helping me, praying for me and been concerned for my job search know that this morning I accepted the position of K-6th music teacher at Homedale Idaho. I am very excited. I hadn’t really imagined myself as a music teacher because though I have experience, I have neither a music major, minor or endorsement which are normally needed. But the more I thought about exciting young students about music the more I wanted this job. I actually was driving to Ephrata for an interview with for an afterschool program in Warden when I got an afterhour phone call from the principal while my cell phone was in roam. I didn’t recognize the number as Homedale so I didn’t answer the call and didn’t know it was the principal until I was in Lagrande at 8:30pm. She called me this morning at 8:15pm.

Thank you to all of you for your help, for your prayers and your concern. This long road has ended and now we begin another long road. I will be living apart from my family for the next 9 months. It will be a 3 hour drive from them which I plan to make ever other week if we can afford it. This will not be an easy life for any of us but it means my family’s needs will be taken care of.

Over in the left hand column is a new addition called “What I’ve been doing.” The source for this is my new twitter page at http://www.twitter.com/jeffreyclong. “What are you doing… what do you have to say in under 140 characters.” It’s sort of a microblog. I can post from my phone or instant messenger client. So keep an eye over there for random stuff.

Nearly everyone growing up since the 1960′s with a television is familiar with the music. He was the composer and performer of the music from the Charlie Brown television shows. I have owned the Charlie Brown Christmas album for quite some time. But I recently discovered that his music is available on emusic.com a music service I subscribe to. Just downloaded a couple more albums. It’s interesting how certain music places me right back in the place where I first heard it. For the rest of my life, listening to Jazz Impressions will put me right back in Albany where I was at my church conference last weekend. Clicking on that link will send you to a page where you can listen to samples by clicking on the little speaker. Enjoy

It’s interesting to look back and see all the stuff I’ve written. More in me then I thought. Though not much lately. Seth Godin had something interesting to say about blogging.

A lot of people have blogs. But most people don’t.

I think you should. Even if you only have one post in you.

Having a blog is pretty daunting, especially if you don’t like blank paper and are the sort of person that hates falling behind. I can imagine that the idea of posting 50 or 300 times a year is a little bit nuts for many people.

But what if there’s just one thing you need to say, but you can say it clearly and well and in a way that hasn’t been said before? What if you’ve got one great blog post inside of you, and, even better, you’re willing to update that post as you learn more and gain more insight?

An entire post about a certain kind of fossil. Or the misuse of a certain word. Or about a key difference between two kinds of bluetooth…

Why not?

What do you have to say? Are you saying it? How could you if you wanted to? There’s lots of places you could, for free. There’s vox.com if you like the traditional blog approach that I use. Another possibility is tumblr.com if all you have is links and quotes and pictures to show. Maybe you want to tell the world what you are doing this very moment. Give twitter.com a look.

What do you have to say? How you gonna say it?

I’m currently listening to a fabulous book called “The assault on reason,” by Al Gore. Insightful to be sure, but he is an amazing writer. I plan to write about it but in the meantime, I thought I’d make people aware of what it is about. This is his description of the book from his blog. Hope it inspires a few people to give it a look.

In the months following the release of An Inconvenient Truth, I began to focus on why our democracy has been so slow to deal with the climate crisis. The unwillingness to solve this problem is not only the result of a lack of political will, but it has also been caused by the emergence of a new political environment dangerously hostile to reason, knowledge, and facts. In the long-term, this poses a threat to the very basis of American democracy: the ability of a well-informed citizenry to use the rule of reason to hold government accountable. This Assault on Reason is the focus of my new book. When George Bush launched his preemptive war in Iraq, more than 70% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorists who caused 9-11. After the 2004 election, when asked what stuck in their minds about the campaign, voters in Ohio named two ads playing to the fears of terrorism paid for by the Bush Campaign. One pattern that has held true since 2001 is that this White House is less interested in openness and truth than any previous administration. We are facing so many long-term challenges, from the climate crisis and the war in Iraq to health care and social welfare. To solve these problems and move forward we need to reverse the damage done to our democracy. We have little time to waste. My goal in The Assault on Reason is to explore why our public forum now welcomes the enemies of reason. More importantly, the book focuses on what we can do together, individually and collectively, to restore the rule of reason to our democracy.

A few weeks ago, I discovered that my kids dig 80′s music, the music of my youth. So, I set out to make a mix CD for them. I was pleasantly surprised that they were listening to it in the car, and that my eldest daughter stole it from the car. So I’ve made my second mix disc and have started work on mix disc three. When I was in my 20′s and 30′s, I never would have believed that the day would come that my music would be played on the classic rock CD and that my children would want to listen to the music I grew up with.

Back when we lived in Soap Lake, I was shopping in Walmart one day and discovered that they were selling video games that were nothing but a joystick. The video game was built into the joystick instead of in a console. But the cool thing about it was that the games were the arcade games I’d grown up with. We bought the first one which had PacMan, Galaxian, RallyX, DigDug and Bosconian. Then we got the one with Ms. PacMan, Galaga and Pole position. Mind you, these are not replicas of the games. These contain the original software that drove the video games. I never would have believed when I was pumping quarters into these games as a teenager that the day would come that I would hold in my hand two joysticks containing 10 of my favorite arcade games, never to pump a quarter again.

When I first moved to Idaho begin pastoring, I lived alone while my wife sold the house in Soap Lake. Having a lot of time to myself, I subscribed to Dish Network. Among other channels, I discovered the SciFi channel. Very soon Friday became SciFi friday when original episodes of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica were played one after the other. Then monday they played reruns of Stargate. Throughout the week there were movies. As a teen, waiting years for the next Star Wars or Star Trek movie, I never would have believed that the day would come that I would have an entire channel devoted to my favorite movie and television genre: science fiction.

I never would have believed any of these things. What a wonderful world.

As the self-declared hard drive prophet of doom, I must remind you all again of the importance of backing up your hard drive. There are two types of people in the world. Those whose hard drive has crashed and those whose hard drives will fail.

In the interest of saving your bacon. Go to http://mozy.com. There you can install a little program that will automatically back up things like your contacts, calendar, email, passwords, photos and your documents folder to the internet. Free for 2gigs of backup. Awesome! Don’t come crying to me when you lose your documents and pictures of your newborn baby.

The following sermon was preached on April 15th, 2007 at Filer Mennonite Church. Illustrations and quotes were taken from the book “Why Forgive” and from the article “The forgiveness factor,” Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today.

In a documentary on the Holocaust, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising talked about the bitterness that remains in his soul over how he and his neighbors were treated by the Nazis: “If you could lick my heart,” he says, “it would poison you.”

Researchers are finding that this Holocaust survivor’s sentiment is not necessarily metaphorical. While the biblical practice of forgiveness is usually preached as a Christian obligation, social scientists are discovering that forgiveness may help lead to victims’ emotional and even physical healing and wholeness.

Radhi Al-Mabuk, Robert Enright, and Paul Cardis published a study in 1995 (Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 24, No. 4) examining forgiveness education with college students who judged themselves to be deprived of parental love. The college students who underwent the more rigorous forgiveness program had “improved psychological health,” including improved self-esteem, hope, and lowered trait anxiety.

In a different study in 1997, Enright and Catherine Coyle sought to determine whether men who identified themselves as hurt by an abortion could benefit from a “structured process designed to facilitate forgiveness.”

The processes involve 20 separate steps, including confronting anger, a willingness to consider forgiveness as an option, acceptance of the pain, and the participant realizing that he has needed others’ forgiveness in the past. After leading their subjects through this process, researchers found significant decreases in clients’ anxiety, anger, and grief.

When Lewis Smedes a theologian set out to write a general book on the theological aspect of forgiveness, he soon discovered that “almost everything that was written about forgiveness was about how God forgives sinful people and how they can experience his forgiveness.”

Today’s text said “Whoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven them. Whoever’s sins you retain, they have been retained.” John 20:23

At first read this sounds like Jesus is giving the disciples the authority to absolve people of their sins against God. In fact, the practice of confession in the Catholic church is taken from this passage. And yet there is not a single incident in the New Testament of the disciples forgiving people’s sins. John Gill in his commentary on John calls the idea that we would be absolving people of their sins blasphemy.

Instead, what I think that this passage is talking about is the offering of forgiveness to each other for their sins against us or others.

This is a quintessential Christian practice. Jerry Cook thought forgiveness so important to the church he made it one of the three core elements in his book “Love, acceptance and forgiveness.” Jesus made it a central ingredient of the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:23 “Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared this…

a king decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. 24 In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars.[k] 25 He couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned—to pay the debt.

26 “But the man fell down before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.’ 27 Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.

28 “But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars.[l] He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment.

29 “His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. 30 But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.

31 “When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. 32 Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ 34 Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt.

35 “That’s what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters[m] from your heart.”

You might be struggling today with forgiving someone. Someone in the church. Someone in your family. A friend. It might be something that happened years ago. Or only moments ago. So we’re going to look at forgiveness today. First we’ll look at a couple myths about what people think forgiveness is. Then what forgiveness actually is. And finally some steps you can take if you are struggling to forgive someone.

Prayer. Lord, you forgave me. You forgive me. You forgave _us_. You forgive _us_. Teach us Lord to forgive each other. To forgive our family. Members of our church. Our friends. Open your word to us Lord. Amen.

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