Category Archives: The Ones Where I Try To Give Advice

Unknown's avatar

Aelred Haters Gon’ Hate

by

I wrote a while back about Aelred and his spiritual friendship. I like friendship; I like writing about it; and I like seeing and experiencing it. But I’ve been thinking about Aelred quite a bit. He has kind of been following me all around, pointing out good examples of love and friendship and bad examples, and keeping me on the straight and narrow. I like that about Aelred: he’s so loving and wonderfully helpful.

There’s something else I really like about Aelred, though. (Besides the fact that his Feast Day is on my birthday! Yeah, that’s right, we celebrate the life of the greatest friends of all time with our friends on my birthday!) When he was writing and teaching and being awesome in the twelfth century, there were some people inexplicably who didn’t like him. I guess this makes sense. No one goes through his whole life without having some haters. And, as everyone knows, haters gonna hate.

The common practice during the twelfth century was to respond to the haters. You did this by writing long and scathing tracts to your haters about why they were wrong and you were better. Some writers, like the always-angry-and-melancholy Abelard, spent the better part of their careers responding to the criticism from these other writers who were never going to agree with anyone anyway. Kind of a useless endeavor, if you ask me. And in Abelard’s case, it cost him to forget about this wonderful girl Heloise who was a keeper if there ever was one.

Anyway, I’m digressing and airing nine-century-old grudges.

Aelred never responded to his haters. And I’m sure, at the time, it felt like all of the world was against him because when you are a public figure and you have haters, it feels like those haters are everyone. But somehow, Aelred pulled through it. He didn’t lash out, and he kept reminding himself, I suspect, that there were plenty of people who loved him. His writing shows it.

Like with most people, Aelred eventually died, but his writing has survived. We have writing from a lot of writers from his time. The cool thing about writing from that time is that they didn’t divorce their personalities from their rhetorical voices so we, as modern readers, easily make judgments about what kind of people they were. And here’s the moral of this story: Aelred, because he was never bitter, never hateful, never spiteful and always loving, is beloved today. Readers read him and feel like they could easily crack open a fresh one with him. And so now, in 2011, Aelred’s haters don’t matter. Because haters die too, and if you don’t respond to them, the record of them dies as well.

How do you deal with haters?

Unknown's avatar

Catch that Panther Pride

by

I am writing from home this weekend. I hail from a very special community that exists in southwest Ohio. This weekend is Homecoming. The high school is on fire with school pride. I love high school pride. It is one of my top favorite things. A lot of people think it’s fake or phony or something, but I think that is mostly because you read Catcher in the Rye in high school. In Catcher in the Rye, everything is phony. So we can’t trust that.

School spirit can be a really cool thing. It unites people. It energizes them. It drives creativity. When I was a senior, one of my good friends got elected to Homecoming Court for the first time. We were all really excited, but the thing was that he was the voice of our class. One day, I’m pretty sure he’s going to host The Price is Right. He was supposed to emcee the halftime show, not be in it. And so the school had to find a replacement. They asked me to do it, and I accepted because I had a public speaking course that semester, and I was pretty sure that talking in front of a classroom was the same thing as talking in front of a football stadium.

It wasn’t.

And there are all of these pictures of me looking a little bit awkward. But I think if you listened to a recording of the halftime show, you would find that I may have done relatively well. And I loved it. I loved every minute of it.

I bring all of this up because this story is the first time I was asked to be THE MAN in a situation. If the halftime show had failed, it would have been on me. But it didn’t. And this whole experience was brought about because of school spirit.

I have one legitimate little brother, but I really have three little brothers who are all seniors at my hometown high school. And I got to see today how good school spirit has been for all of them. I went to the Homecoming pep rally. My real brother was dressed up as a cheerleader. And my other two brothers rapped. And it was great. But everyone was surprised. (Not so much about my cheerleader brother; people expect things like that from him.) But multiple teachers approached me during the day and said, “I didn’t know Zach and AJ rapped.” My point is that perhaps these teachers would have never known if not for school spirit.


What’s your Homecoming story?

Unknown's avatar

Praying for Pokemon Cards

by

I struggle a lot with prayer. I never know how specific I should get with my prayers. Should I be asking God to give me Ferraris, introduce me to Zooey Deschanel, and become a best-selling author? I don’t know. But sometimes I feel like a little kid when I pray, asking for things that I think I want but actually don’t. What was the number one request of child Spencer? Pokemon cards. Do I still use my Pokemon cards? No. I wish I had asked for books. Lots and lots of books. And I feel like this is what it’s like when we come to God for something. God knows our own destinies infinitely better than we do and so asking an omniscient being for things seems a bit childish.

For a long time, I thought prayer was silly because of this passage from Jesus in Matthew:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. (Matthew 6:25-26)

Notice how this passage says nothing about prayer. I was severely misguided in my thoughts. See, Jesus, only a few verses earlier is teaching his disciples how to pray. I guess I always kind of glossed over that part because it wasn’t a very compelling story. But there is a very compelling story of prayer that happens really early on in the Bible.

This story occurs in Genesis 18. Abraham has been hanging out with God for a while. Abraham was one of those cool people that God actually walked around with. And they chatted, probably hiking mountains together and watching the sunrise and cool stuff like that. But in Genesis 18, God tells Abraham that he is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities that have fallen into such sin that they would make Las Vegas look like Heaven on Earth. This doesn’t sit well with Abraham. So he asks God if God will save Sodom and Gomorrah if there are at least 50 righteous people in these cities. God grants that He won’t. And Abraham asks, “Well what about 45?” And again God grants that He won’t. All of this goes on for a while until Abraham gets down to 5, and God again grants that 5 righteous people would be enough.

This story is so powerful. Obviously, God never intended to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there were righteous people there, but it was important that Abraham ask for their salvation. Sometimes, we get it into our head that if God already knows everything, then we don’t need to ask him for anything. But God wants us to. He wants to have a personal relationship with us. He wants to talk and hear about our lives, and even though He knows how He can make it better, He wants to know how we think it could be made better.