NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

Do you ever try to decipher those personalized licenses plates? I do! We even have one, 'ACE IV', our car.It stands for the first initials of my husband's name, and the Roman numeral four because he is the fourth generation where the eldest son  of the eldest son has had the same name!   For us, it is obvious, for others not so much. I remember one day having a stranger in a parking lot ask my husband if he player poker. Apparently he thought that the licence plate was memorializing an exceptional poker hand of 4 aces! The other day as I was driving through the parking lot at the mall, I saw this licence plate: CLNGRL. It stumped me until I remembered that one of the common ways to come up with these plates is just to remove the vowels. So I guessed ‘CaRoLiNa GiRL’ was the message it was imparting. It was an ‘AHA‘ moment when I learned that Hebrew does not have any letters that are designated as vowels. “When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks ab...

As long as I can remember I  wanted to be a teacher. I used to line up my stuffed animals and dolls in front of a chalk board for their daily lessons before I had ever darkened the doors of a schoolroom myself. All these years later, and in retirement, I still think that teaching was, for me, the best job ever. However while I always felt like I was doing what I was meant to be doing, I have come to see that it has shaped my life, and therefore my current reaction to events. As a teacher, it was my job to see that the students under my care learned. And if they didn't learn, then there must be another way of presenting the material or another way of explaining it, that would make everything crystal clear. In fact, that what the student took away with them, or didn’t, was my fault! While I now realize that ‘fault’ is a strong word to use here, nonetheless that is what the school culture believed and taught. In a way this is exactly what is happening in many of the instituti...

"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire." - Ferdinand Foch [as quoted in The 32d Infantry Division in World War II (1956) by Harold Whittle Blakeley, p. 3].  Foch was a French military general and when he talked about weapons, he was usually talking about the kind that exploded killing people. But not this time. So what did Foch mean when he talked about the ‘human soul on fire’? When something is on fire, it is consumed. When the human soul is on fire it too is consumed with an  ‘intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction’   for something. We might say it is consumed by passion.  The first definition of SOUL [according to the Merriam Webster online dictionary] is ‘the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life’ . Over the last few years, we have often heard ‘The 10,000 Hour Rule’ quoted  that with 10,000 hours of appropriate practice anyone can master a skill such a...

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Dwight D. Eisenhower, US general and 34th president (1890-1969) As I think back over my life, it is clear that my understanding of what Stewardship involves has changed along with my understanding of the message of Christianity. My first experience with Stewardship (although not by that name) was when as a teenager in order to achieve a goal, every time we denied ourselves something, no matter how inexpensive, that same amount went into our special box. And we did it  -  saving up what was needed, 5 cents here and a quarter there. As a Stewardship chairperson, in my 30s/40s, I saw Stewardship as everyone paying their share for the upkeep and programmes of the church with a realistic dollar figure in the budget line for envelope givings. Tithing was not even in the picture....