Timothy George delivers the homily at the funeral of Charles Colson:
Charles Colson Funeral Sermon
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Category Archives: General
Why bow ties are better than traditional neckties
by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing
I first encountered a real living person wearing a bow tie in 1994 as a freshman at Samford University. Since that time, I’ve periodically worn bow ties (I currently own six or seven) and have flirted with making bow ties my exclusive neckwear choice. Every guy should consider owning and regularly wearing a bow tie. Here are five reasons.
- Bow ties are easy to tie. There is a common misperception that tying a bow tie is difficult. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you tie your shoes on a regular basis then you can tie a bow tie. If you don’t wear shoes that requiring tying then you probably shouldn’t be wearing a tie to begin with.
- Bow ties exude confidence. Fewer than five percent of men wear bow ties. Nothing says, “I am confident of my manhood,” like rejecting the herd, the 95% of men, who stick to a regular tie.
- Keep company with great minds and great men. Think about men known for wearing bow ties: Winston Churchill, George Will, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Dennis Sansom (for a more complete list go here). Consider: no recent president has worn a bow tie on a regular basis. Could this be the cause of our national malaise?
- Bow ties are eminently safe (yet risky). No man wearing a bow tie was ever sucked into a shredder or mutilated in any other office accident on the basis of his neckwear. The bow tie is safe yet fashionable, but with an edge (think Indiana Jones).
- Bow ties offer a classy critique of “business casual.” Growing up did you ever seriously aspire to wearing a golf shirt and dockers to work? The bow tie is technically less formal than the traditional tie but offers a classier and more formal look than a polo shirt–embrace it.
Do you wear a bow tie regularly? Why? Why not?
Like this:
My new sidewalk
For the last couple of weeks the City of Winston-Salem has been laying a sidewalk on our street. It’s something I’ve hoped for over the last four years. In fact, I cannot tell you how happy I am to have access to that small strip of concrete!
In some ways it seems ridiculous–why do you need a dedicated piece of concrete for walking? Technically you don’t, but given the distracted nature of modern driving its sort of nice. Ours is a busy street and walking (especially with a stroller) was difficult as you had to walk on the outside of parked cars since many yards are impassible to a stroller.
A sidewalk sends the message: “we expect you to walk.” Not only does it communicate the expectation, it also makes provision for the safety and relative comfort of the walker. Building a sidewalk is an act of hospitality rather than of strict necessity, but in creating a community its important for people to safely and comfortably be able to walk outside of their homes so they can meet their neighbors and share life. A sidewalk can help make this happen.
My house was built in 1941 and it’s almost like World War II started and all the sidewalk money was diverted to the war effort. Now, some seventy years later, we’re getting a sidewalk of our own!
Driven to distraction
It’s Christmastide, which means one thing–travel. During our annual ten-plus hour drive to the Gulf Coast of Alabama we stopped in a remarkable gas station north of Atlanta. As I moved around the car to take the gas pump in hand, I was confronted with a smallish flat panel television mounted immediately above the price display. It was showing NFL highlights complete with sound. High above me muzak wafted out from speakers in the awning and together with the tunes clearly audible from a neighboring car (despite closed windows) it formed a perfect trifecta of noise-pollution.
Random moments of quiet are quickly shrinking from our lives. Every nook and cranny of our waking hours is filled with some form of stimulation designed to propel us toward the consumption of some goods or services. Go to a restaurant, even a relatively expensive one, and you’ll find at least one television. Find yourself in your doctors office waiting for an appointment and there will be some form of visual and auditory stimulation offering you information about some disease or condition sponsored by a purveyor of one drug or another. Noise is ubiquitous.
It’s amazing how comfortable we have become with noise and other forms of stimulation. The instant the power goes off during a winter storm or an electronic device fails many of us start getting really anxious–stir crazy. We need something to do. That’s because distraction is addictive. I forget where I read it but scientists have found that the “ping” of a new email releases a small amount of dopamine into our brain–we keep going back to email, Facebook, Twitter, because we get a biochemical reward for it.
The key to focus is learning to steward technology and distraction so as to control it rather than be controlled by it. It’s unlikely that you’ll ever be able to get away with not having email–we have become too accustomed to this technology to be able to move past it yet.
Some ideas for keeping your focus:
- Turn off new mail notifications.
- Schedule time to process email. Try 30 minutes twice or three times a day (10am, 1pm, 5pm).
- Get noise-cancelling headphones.
- Automate and schedule your social media interactions. Try an app like Buffer <www.bufferapp.com>
How do you maintain optimal focus at home and work?
Churchill, depression, and profound insight
Many look to Winston Churchill as a profoundly insightful leader who guided a nation during some very dark years. He may have even saved a civilization. I find it interesting to explore a little of the man who provided such guidance in such dire times.
According to our current American narrative, we might expect Churchill to be a self-made, self-confident, out-going, charismatic sort of leader. The reality is that he was born into the aristocracy as son of Lord Randolph Churchill, himself a politician, the third son of the Duke of Marlborough. In many ways he ways more eccentric than charismatic and given to periods of profound despondency, which he called “black dog” (borrowing the term from Samuel Johnson).
It may well have been Churchill’s eccentricity, his propensity for brooding, that gave him to the insight to see Nazism as the threat it was. We often see depression as a malady to be overcome rather than a gift to be cultivated. John Gray writes in the BBC News Magazine,
… it’s hard to resist the thought that the dark view of the world that came on Churchill in his moods of desolation enabled him to see what others could not. He owed his foresight of the horror that was to come to the visits of the black dog.
One of marks of a visionary is the ability to see things that others miss. Often this insight, this sense, comes because there is something about the person that is abnormal. There is something in the temperament, the makeup of that person that allow her to see beyond what everyone else sees. This often seems eccentric to others–unexplainable, something to forgotten about. However, it becomes smoothing of a theme to the visionary.
In Churchill’s case, chance and the actions of some friends caused the intersection of his vision with the opportunity to occupy a position (as Prime Minister) in which he could do something about it. The rest, as they say, is history.
Churchill’s “black dog” was not a malady to be overcome, as I write above, but a gift to be cultivated. So, how do you cultivate depression? How do you manage living with it in such a way as to allow it to be something redemptive in your life?
Some thoughts:
- Cultivate friendships — melancholy demands solitude. It’s important to balance solitude with good company.
- Try not to take yourself too seriously — the difference between a sane man and a mad man is doubt. Remember, you might be wrong so learn to laugh at yourself.
- Get a therapist — a therapist can help you uncover and unlearn some of the destructive behavioral and cognitive patterns that can move you into paralysis. In my experience, therapy isn’t a cure but a way of finding new tools and deeper perspectives on living with a new reality.
- Give expression to your thoughts — blog, journal, talk — get it out of your head and onto paper or a screen.
- Find a non-verbal creative outlet. It’s often helpful for this to be something that is physically taxing or at least something tactile. Many enjoy gardening or painting.
How do you manage despondency or melancholy?
