Friends ... News you can trust is infinitely more satisfying than news you can’t.  See the column below.  

First, a couple of love notes.  My younger son John and his wife Jeni in Fort Lauderdale are due to have their first child, a SON, Oct. 30 – next Monday.  Elder son Eric and wife Lindsey in Utah, also expecting but not until February, had the gender reveal party Sunday and it’s a GIRL to go with big brother Banner (4) and big sister Haven (2). My cup runneth over.

For you mathematicians, 884 weekly columns divided by 52 weeks a year makes this week’s column the completion of 17 consecutive years writing Common Christianity.  Shooting for 17 more!

Now, here’s the column.  God bless.

Bob

--- --- ---

Spirituality Column #884

October 21, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Info Central

By Bob Walters

“Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.” – Psalm 51:6, David’s beautiful lament to God after Nathan pointed out David’s sin

Why is it I can find the most disturbing parts of the Bible somehow calming, and almost any aspect of modern news media and commentary wrenchingly disturbing?

I’ve settled on this answer: it’s because I trust the Bible as God’s unwavering and righteous truth, and understand the media as merely man’s catalog of loaded opinions and politically-philosophically-socially “correct” – and so-often bogus – narratives.

High-alert discernment is wearying; truth waggling is insulting; the news is tiring.

I like to think it was not always that way … about the media, I mean.  I grew up in journalism.  My dad worked for the Associated Press in Detroit and then was a city editor for a newspaper in Michigan. I wrote sports for my local newspaper starting in my senior year in high school, earned a journalism degree in college, and spent roughly 12 years writing and editing daily sports news.  Dad always hoped I’d become a “real journalist” and cover the city hall and crime beats.  I was having fun in sports, thank you.

But in Dad’s era – the 50s and early 60s – journalism held fast to straight news and objectivity. Sure, different newspapers had different and well-known “slants,” but headlines provided information, not teases.  Truth was pursued; facts were honorable.

Stories were “inverted pyramids” of prioritized facts in descending order, the better to cut copy from the bottom when space ran tight.  The readers’ time was considered valuable: “tell ‘em what they need to know” … quickly.  The readers’ reasoning powers were trusted; specious and purpose-pitch insinuations were ridiculed.

Today in online “print” news with infinite space, we have click-bait heds and shaggy-dog ledes to draw us inward to intrusive advertising surrounding and embedded in imprecise paragraphs.  Broadcast news, commentary, and even “entertainment” largely toes an annoyingly Progressive “don’t think, just believe us” line of arrogance and deadly falsehoods.  Trust wanes.  Most media offer pot holes and land mines.

George Orwell … we never should have doubted you.  Prevarication reigns.

Conversely, much of my life – I am 69 years old – I did not know or trust God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the Bible. That has changed. Truth and righteousness reside with them, and I know searching the scriptural path will lead me to peace.  Reading the Old Testament, the first time through, for me, was devastatingly upsetting in some parts and overwhelmingly boring in others (all those “begats,” tribal lists, and laws). Yet, it is the story of God and the story of humanity: a catalog of what does not work for humans.   Jesus is the culmination of that story; faith in Him is true and the end will be glorious.

Jesus has been left behind in our large media picture, just like I left Him out of my life’s worldview and philosophy for many years.  Truth was elusive and hope was a situational and materialistic variable, not the spiritual surety Jesus has brought to me.

I sparingly, warily, look at a dozen or so news websites daily, receive the print editions of both the Wall Street Journal and the Epoch Times, and stopped watching TV news and commentary after the 2022 election. It has been the most satisfying and healthiest ceasefire since I quit smoking 30 years ago (January 1, 1994).

My ever-dwindling time now is focused on my trusted family, friends, colleagues, students, and a Lord I love and trust.  Peace in this life is indeed elusive, and I know exactly where to go for Good News, truthfully, anytime I need it.  Wisdom comes at last.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) can handle bad news but hates being lied to.

Spirituality Column #806

April 26, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Sparky’s Magic Piano

By Bob Walters

One of my earliest memories – a vivid, before-kindergarten recollection – is of a record album my dad bought for us kids titled “Sparky’s Magic Piano.”

We’re talking circa 1958, when a “record” was one of those flat vinyl discs you put on a “record player.”  Dad – John Walters, 1926-1991 – was a classical music buff and I vividly remember as a little kid when he and mom brought home our new “Hi-Fi” – a “Pilot” brand, tube-based, monaural (not stereo) furniture-grade, dark, square-ish, top-opening floor unit.  It had a matching second speaker Dad placed on the other side of our small living room at 321 Lincoln Blvd., in the Lakeview suburb of Battle Creek, Mich.

Dad had shopped around and was convinced this Pilot was the richest, best sounding home Hi-Fi unit available.  It wasn’t the stereo-TV-radio combo many baby-boomers grew up with. It was just a record player, but a truly magnificent sounding one.

Along with the predictable Bach-Beethoven-Brahms-Mozart-Tchaikovsky recordings that started his soon-to-be-substantial collection, Dad brought home for us kids – just my older sister Linda and I at the time; Joe was a baby and Debbie came along a bit later – a story-and-music boxed album set of “Sparky’s Magic Piano.”

One way you knew, from a practical standpoint, that it was for the kids – the title notwithstanding – was that the three-record set was numbered with Sides 1 and 6 on the first record, then 2 and 5, then 3 and 4.  You could stack them on the changer, listen to Sides 1 through 3, then flip the whole stack and listen to Sides 4 through 6.

On Dad’s multi-platter concert albums, Sides 1 and 2 were on the same disc so you couldn’t stack them on the changer and possibly scratch them when they dropped.

That record player remained part of my life up into my adulthood, but let’s talk about Sparky.  He was a mythical boy with desire but little talent who wanted very much to play great piano.  Alas, Sparky made a deal with the devil, trading his own soul for the talent to be a world-famous concert pianist prodigy.  On Side 6, the devil wants his talent back and leaves Sparky on stage devastated and humiliated, unable to play.

Moral to the story:  You have to work for and earn lasting success and joy.

Satan’s funny that way.  The human condition is rife with desires to be really good at something for the sake of fame and money, rather than the purer and Godly route of putting in the work and love required to bring true joy to one’s endeavors.

Satan always wants his gifts back, because they are worldly, fleeting, and based in pride, greed, and power.  He has no power to create life; death is his only payout.

Beethoven was great at music because he loved it.  Larry Bird loved basketball.  Billy Graham loved Jesus and loved leading people to Christ.  The happiest people I know – probably who any of us know – are the ones whose families, lives, vocations, professions, and hobbies have been shaped by something larger than pedantic earthly measurements of time, sweat, and desire. Like, say, love, service, faith, and God’s gifts.

In this post-Easter period of joy and reflection, one lesson from the Cross of Jesus is that nothing truly worthwhile comes cheaply or easily.  Another is that love and sacrifice, not fame or money, are the life sparks that burn hottest, brightest, and longest.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), whose dad sang tenor in Michigan State’s a cappella men’s choir in the 1940s, figures surely others know of Sparky’s Magic Piano.