In my hands

 The longest Psalm in the Bible, Psalm 119, has 176 lines. In one verse after another it focuses on the way in which we should live, that is, according to the commandments and instructions of our Father God. 

But every so often there’s a line in this Psalm which seems puzzling, almost out of place. One such line is, My life is continually in my hands. 

In whose hands? You’d expect the writer to say my life is in God’s hands. But no, he writes: in my hands. 

How can that be? Surely one of the consistent statements of the Bible is that we should give our lives into God’s hands, not try and run our lives our own way. 

Even though God does allow us to live as though we had control of our lives, He doesn’t recommend it. Back in one of the first five books of the Bible, when the people of Israel were about to enter the Promised Land, their leader Joshua warned them about not going off in their own way, doing their own thing.

After explaining what will happen to them - both if they didn’t live according to God’s laws, and if they did - he says, Choose you this day whom you will serve.

Even though God brought them out of slavery in Egypt, they were still given a choice as to whether to follow Him. Their lives were in their hands.

It’s a decision we all have to make, on a daily basis. Are we going to do what we want – or what God wants? 

However, the line back in Psalm 119, doesn’t just consist of my life is continually in my hands. There’s a second line, a kind of answer to the first, which says, But I do not forget Your law. That is, of course, God’s law. 

So we might say My life is continually under my control, but I need to choose who I’m going to serve. Is it me and things I idolise, or is it the one true God?

A verse from Psalm 119

The budget

Unusually, the Editor of the Star Midweek gave me a little promo on the front page of the paper – or else he had a little gap to fill - and decided to introduce my column thus:

Mike Crowl in his Column 8 today writes about the budget; well, sort of writes about the budget; well, would you believe almost writes about the budge on…Page 2.

()()()()()()()()()

The budget

A friend asked me if I was writing about the budget. (I hadn’t thought about it.) Without waiting for a reply, he answered his own question: Well, I don’t suppose it’s all that funny, anyway.

So I’m half-heartedly writing about the budget which, funny or not, by the time you read this will have already banged or whimpered into our lives.

Firstly, I’m pleased to see from the Listener’s alternative budget that I’m not classed in the wealthy bracket anymore (in spite of the untold millions I earn from writing this column each week).

In fact, our size of family doesn’t even make it on to their charts. And it’s not because we have seventeen kids either.

I’d better explain. After my wife and I had our first child it became a standing joke between us that when anyone asked how many kids in total we were having, we’d say, seventeen. Even our Catholic friends turned pale.

We didn’t make it. Blame it on a lack of stamina, or too much writing of Columns Eight, or the high-chair falling apart, or running out of nappies - when it comes to a large family we hardly hit the mark.

There’s something to be said for a large family, though. (I haven’t been able to find out what it is, so I’ll carry on.) Older moviegoers will remember Clifton Webb as the indomitable father in the film, Cheaper by the Dozen. He claimed it was more economical to have a dozen kids and proved it time and again by fronting up to bemused shop-keepers and asking for discounts.

I didn’t see the film, but I did read the book. Practically all I can recall about it now was that the father, a time and motion study man, insisted it was speedier to do up his shirt buttons from the bottom, instead of the top. He would have made a successful politician, I think.

Oh, well, back to the budget. I see one of the economists in the Listener thinks we need more people in the country to make the economy work. I’ve held this same despised theory for years – although, like any economist worth his salt, I won’t be cornered about the details (and now Mr Birch is even coming round to my way of thinking).

Surely if more people come into the country (preferably with some ready cash) then there’ll be a need for more facilities and goods, and, in spite of what pessimists would say, more employment. New Zealand’s present immigration policy seems to be like a person who digs a moat round his castle then pulls up the drawbridge – and wonders why he feels cut off. No doubt some bureaucrats would say of the immigration policy that it’s all right here, but I can’t agree.

There’s probably an optimum figure at which things cease to work well, but at three and a half million I don’t think we’ve reached it. We’re already suffering in the South Island from an exodus north – why not open up some of our endless acres to the bodies standing shoulder to shoulder overseas? They’d be glad to have some personal space.

Oh well, back to the budget.

More people, more pollution, some would say. One scientist writes that because of pollution and jammed roads and motorway costs, bigger cities are now forcing drivers to leave their cars at home. People have to use public transport. It’ll come here, no doubt.

And built into that carless age we have a solution to unemployment. Everyone who’s anyone will have to take a bus, or a train – remember trains? Believe it or not, there’ll be buses going everywhere you want to go, instead of just where they think it’s economical.

Won’t that make the bus drivers glad? (They might celebrate by turning the lights back on in the buses so that when we’re travelling we can read again.)

I was going to get back to the budget, but unfortunately, having fewer pages to work with than our Ruthie, I seem to have run out of room.

 

Clifton Webb with some of his dozen children

This column probably shows why it was a good idea I never took up the role of an economist. Not that anyone asked me to. Since 1991 New Zealand’s population has increased to over five million, still no large number, since many cities in the world have the same population. And while we have a lot more cars, our roads are hardly jam-packed.

Unfortunately there has been a change in thinking about immigration, but not, I feel, a wise change. Instead of inviting people who had some money behind them, we’ve taken in a number of people who have nothing and who also bring their families with them – who have nothing – and we find them houses (somehow, even though houses are in short supply) – and we maintain them until they get on their feet. In spite of this, many immigrants prove to be practical and entrepreneurial citizens; a number do not, unfortunately.

As for stopping people bringing cars into cities, the powers that be eventually came up with a seemingly credible reason why we shouldn’t: climate change, and the damage cars’ emissions  was doing to the planet. So parking spaces are increasingly removed in cities, replaced by cycle lanes. Some cities are amenable to cycles, since their mostly flat. The city I lived in when this column was written was built on seven hills (supposedly) and cycling was only of value to people who stayed in the flat parts of the city, or who were excessively energetic.

 

 

Thankfulness

 My granddaughter recently texted me to say: I stop and think about how important it is to enjoy our time and be grateful for what I have, so I have been really focusing on just being present and thankful each day at the moment.

I responded with the question: who are you being grateful to?

Can we express gratitude without there being a recipient of our gratitude?

I’ve been intrigued to see ads appearing occasionally in the newspaper asking, ‘What are you thankful for?’ They show a man thinking about things he might be thankful about.

I was interested to know where these ads originated, and found that they come from The Thankfulness Project. This is run from a website called Be Great.

The Thankfulness Project focuses on mental health. Its aim is to help people get past their issues with themselves and look outwards.

The question I ask when I see the Thankfulness ads is the same one I asked my granddaughter. Can we actually be thankful without having someone to thank? It feels to me a bit like we’re thanking in a void, or just inside our own heads, as if we’d received a birthday present from our parents, took it outside and said to no one in particular, Thank you! Thank You!

I’m not sure that the parents would feel their gift was being acknowledged.

Being thankful is something that God’s Word, the Bible, continually encourages us to do. But unlike the Thankfulness Project, the Bible shows us who to be grateful to, that is, the One who made us, and who gives us everything in creation to enjoy.

In more than one place, the Bible says: Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, and his mercies towards us are ongoing and forever.

Stuart Townend, one of the best Christian hymn writers of today, wrote a song called, My Heart is Filled with Thankfulness. In the last stanza he writes:

My heart is filled with thankfulness
To Him who reigns above;
Whose wisdom is my perfect peace,
Whose every thought is love.

Just as the child should thank his or her parents for their gifts, so we should thank Our Heavenly Father for His many gifts to us. This is good not just for our mental health, but our spiritual health.

Stuart Townend, from the In Christ Alone UK tour.
Courtesy Getty Images

Being had on (having someone on...)

 First published in Column 8 on the 24^th July, 1991

 I recently overhead a conversation at the library – my second home.

‘We’re only having you on,’ the librarian said with some amusement, after having found she’d unintentionally convinced a lady that she’d have to pay a fee to join the library.

But the lady was oblivious to the joke – somehow it had passed her by.

I mention this not to condemn the librarian in any way – librarians are amongst my most helpful acquaintances – but to comment on the fact that it’s only in the last few years that I’ve understood how great a divide separates the two peoples of the world: those who appreciate being had on and those who don’t.

When I was a callow youth, I spent my first several months in London blissfully having everyone on in a typical Kiwi fashion. Only after a portly Welsh baritone came to me one day and told me that not everybody understood I was only joking did I reconsider how I put things.

To be quite honest, I was amazed. Everybody I’d gone to school with – or nearly – and certainly all my family regarded having other other people on as a normal part of human interaction.

And having people on is so ingrained I find it hard to stop. I’m addicted to it: I have to test everyone out. Some people click immediately. Others stare blankly, because what you’ve said to them is so blatantly silly they wonder why an apparently intelligent person could have opened his mouth and said it.

I can often tell from people’s body language what their reaction will be and that it would be wiser to leave them alone, but even then I’ll risk it.

Most New Zealanders can be had on, unless they’re in the midst of some trend that requires everything to be taken very seriously. Yuppies and Dinkies (double-income, no kids) possibly fall into this category, as do people who are having guilt trips about our ancestry.

In spite of what the Welshman said, many English people can be had on. My wife and her family are prime exponents of the art. The out-laws, as the rest of us call ourselves, vary somewhat in our ability to respond, from the reasonably aware like myself to those who adopt the cold fish approach.

I don’t find, however, that many Americans enjoy having the mickey taken out of them.

My theory about that is as follows: the English have been around so long they can afford to be had on; they’ve survived the Norman Conquest and Hitler and having their crisps mucked about with by the EEC.

The average New Zealander enjoys being had on because we’re still like a nation of kids, finding out how to pronounce each other’s language, and either overdoing it or doing it undone.

The Americans, however, have discovered that they now have culture with a capital C. After all, they invented some real art forms, like jazz and Westerns and the Simpsons, and people are beginning to release that they’re a force to be reckoned with. They’re out to save the world.

This makes them more likely to take themselves seriously. Someone coming along and trying to have you on, is just not on!

Here’s a totally irrelevant afterthought. Has anyone considered doing a thesis on the etymological roots of the phrase ‘to have on?’ I’m sure it’s a subject that would keep an otherwise unoccupied English major occupied for years.

 

The photo has little to do with my subject, but it's 
delightful to see Princess Anne enjoying herself. 
Courtesy: Ian Livesey

Since I wrote this thirty-four years ago, nothing’s changed. I’m as bad as ever at having people on, or kidding them, or taking the mickey out of them. Though I’ve never learned exactly what the mickey is…

 

 

 

Aliens

First published in Column 8 on the 17^th of July, 1991

One of the most difficult statements not of a third kind that I’ve closely encountered in the last week related to the 22^nd annual gathering of the Mutual UFO Network.

Stanton Friedman, a physicist, but plainly not a plain-speaking on, said, ‘Most people believe in UFOs, but most people believe that most people don’t believe in UFOs.’

Run that by me again, Stanton?

Visitors from out space have been the ‘in thing’ for several decades, helped along by Hollywood, television, a burgeoning sci-fi market, and people who either really have seen things from outer space or dreamed them up. People such as Debbie Toomey, who tells the story of being abducted by aliens back in 1983.

I’m not one to scoff at beliefs in UFOs. Modern physicists’ theories about the universe are far more incredible, anyway. Nor do I have any great trouble with there being a possibility of inhabited planets somewhere else in the immense reaches of space.

More to the point, I find it odd to think that aliens would be interested in visiting us. Would they really travel not just the length of our otherwise uninhabited solar system to find us, but billions of miles from their own home?

Encouraged by films such as Star Wars we have these marvellous ideas about the speed of space travel, what with time warps and skipping through light years. When it’s only a story, we don’t have to explain how mankind – or any other kind – is supposed to have developed skills sufficient to travel through the limitless reaches of space. (Anyway, most space stories are about something much less subtle altogether – cops and robbers.)

If aliens did turn up here, what would our reaction be? People would either tend to keep quiet about it, because the aliens were so out of the ordinary, or feel threatened by them. These two have been the staple of stories as widely different as ET and It Came From Outer Space. It’s what you’d expect.

To be honest I don’t think aliens would normally make their presence widely known – they’d only have to take one look at our planet to realise that we don’t treat anyone who smacks of ‘difference’ too well.

The most alien being ever known to have visited this world arrived in very unpublicised circumstances. During his stay he managed to keep out of the limelight as much as possible, even though his actions made that difficult. He often told people not to talk about what he’d done, and when they did anyway, he tended to retreat into the mountains.

Many of the top dogs felt exceedingly threatened by him: in fact, the ruler of the day tried to wipe him out within a year or two of his arrival and massacred a number of innocent babies in the attempt. Typical reactions towards an alien.

When he did come out in the open and explain his ‘mission,’ as you might call it, he had exactly the same response from people that alleged aliens still have.

Unfortunately, for the most part people didn’t want to hear his words, or believe what he had to say, and, as in so many alien stories, they attacked him and eventually killed him. This alien did something truly spectacular – he came back to life, and has had a major impact on the world and its inhabitants ever since.

Of course you have to believe the story.

What I find strange in all these current discussions of aliens is how so many people who find the story of Christ incredible can cheerfully swallow all manner of nonsense about anything else.

 

Poster from the 1953 movie It Came From Outer Space

A couple of quotes relating to Debbie Toomey – also known as Kathy (or Kathie) Davis. The sources are in the links at the beginning of each paragraph.

The argument Ufologists make about the physical reality of abduction experiences has been well expressed by Bruce Maccabee in a recent letter in the Bulletin of Anomalous Experience, a newsletter I publish for mental health professionals and others interested in abductions. Though Maccabee acknowledged that "to date most abduction experiences are not accompanied by evidence that could establish a physical reality, e.g., physical effects on the environment or even independent witnesses," he pointed out that some are:
Of particular interest are the abduction cases in which there is a continuum between the apparently objective experience of seeing a UFO (bright light or structured flying object) and the abduction experience itself. The case of Kathy Davis (Debbie Toomey) in Budd Hop kins' book Intruders is an excellent example. Physical phenomena recorded in the ground in her back yard (a sizeable area in which the grass was killed, the soil seemingly sterilized because grass didn't grow back for a long time) during the abduction experience, plus the recollections of other members of her family at the time provide a considerable amount of evidence that something "real and physical" (whatever that means!) occurred during the abduction. (Maccabee, 1992, p. 1)

and

In Intruders (1987), Hopkins provides the reason behind the tracking of humans. The book centres on the experiences of Kathie Davis, who claimed upwards of a dozen abduction experiences since childhood. During Davis’s experiences, the “Grays” performed repeated gynaecological examinations. Under hypnosis, Davis eventually recovered memories of the aliens impregnating her and subsequently removing the foetus. In a later encounter, the beings showed her the result of this experiment: a half-human, half-Gray daughter. She described the being as having big, blue eyes; pale skin; a tiny mouth; and a head that was larger than normal (p. 223). Based on Davis’s memories, Hopkins concluded that alien abductions are part of a long-term extraterrestrial breeding experiment.

Hopkins, B. (1987). Intruders: The incredible visitations at Copely Woods. New York: Ballantine. Hough, P. (1989).

 

A night to remember

 First published in Column 8 on 10^th July, 1991

Before Christmas I wrote that some of the city’s historic events get bypassed in the news. Today I’m under obligation to mention one such occasion, though perhaps it should have been forgotten – and quickly!

 As I’ve said previously, I accompany soloists in one of the town’s brass bands – in view of the following I won’t mention its name. One of the perks of the job is being invited to their annual dinner, this year held amongst dragon decorations in a Chinese restaurant.

At their annual dinners the various sections of the band each like to perform a little item. This year they were to do some lip-synching; in other words, pretending to play and sing along to a pre-recorded tape.

There were to be four judges for the evening, including, I found to my dismay, yours truly.

As judge I was supposed to give marks and make notes (read ‘rude comments’) about the performances. However, it isn’t easy to be witty between umpteen courses of a Chinese meal, the constant refrain of ‘it’s my birthday tomorrow’ from a slightly inebriated bandsman, and the spectacularly varied items. None of my uninspired judgements received an airing, for which I am grateful.

About midnight, when the waitresses were despairing of ever going home, the judges were summoned before the audience to speak. I was given a generous 48 seconds, but since public wit comes to me no easier than private, I gave them no more than a sentence – and I don’t mean life.

Now that I’m in the relaxed atmosphere of my word processor, I can say the items varied from the insane to the amazing to the ‘I’m only doing this because I have to, but I wish I was somewhere else.’

The baritones performed the perennial Along Came John. This enthusiastic pack of melodramatic hams were so boisterous you failed to notice their lack of synchronisation.

The second cornets mimed a song by the rock group, Queen. The energy level was over the top in this one, cardboard guitars and all, and the lead singer was almost as gross as the sound. The female guitarist seemed incapable of standing up or still. Nevertheless, whether supine or rampant, she continued to play her guitar.

The performance was rather surreal, really. By the time they finished it was hard to tell whether the antics of the actors aroused the screaming and shrieking on the soundtrack, or whether the latter was causing the painful gyrations of the performers. Either way it was a major assault on the senses.

Somewhat more refined was a performance of a piece by Diana Ross and the Supremes. Diana Ross was played by a gentleman with a wig definitely in need of a perm. (The wig, I mean.) A bit of electrolysis wouldn’t have gone amiss, either, on his/her moustache, or on all of the performers’ six hairy armpits.

Apart from these tonsorial matters the three artistes lip-synched excellently, the two back-up singers elegantly performing a complex choreography like up-market Hawaiian hula girls.

The most credible lip-synching came in the piece de resistance of the evening. It was also the only item in which the males managed to stay in male attire.

These gents performed Nessun Dorma with all the bravura of Signor Pavarotti and Co, and twice as much stress and body language, including constant deference to one another, and handkerchiefs to the brows. So strong was their performance, and so full of vocality, that it threatened to spill over onto the audience. I mention this because I was in the front row and the thought of three hulking tenors tumbling on you makes even the most equitable judge mindful of his mortality.

For better or worse, I lived to tell the tale.

 

French brass players clowning around in a street performance
courtesy: KimonBerlin

 The ‘baritones’ mentioned above are not singers but the bandsmen who play the instrument known as a ‘baritone,’ that is, in the middle range of the band.

A list-full

 First published in Column 8 on the 3^rd July, 1991. This is the original version of the column – a later rewrite for a now defunct revenue share site, Triond, appears elsewhere on this blog.

When the television series, The Story of English, was shown some time ago, I was so enthusiastic about it that I videoed it each week at a friend’s house – even though we didn’t even own a VCR. The series only confirmed what I think about the English language – that, like Muhammad Ali, it’s The Greatest.

However, in the course of much study over many years, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are some omissions in the language, even though it’s as ever-expanding as the Universe.

English lacks a number of what could be quite useful words, particularly in the suffix departments labelled ‘ful’ and ‘less.’

To get started, take the word ‘wrongful.’ We use this in relation to a person being unjustly arrested. Surely the word should be ‘wrongless.’ If you’ve done nothing wrong, then how can your arrest be described as wrong-full?

We think of certain kinds of marriage as ‘loveless.’ Why then don’t we call those marriages that last for 50 or 60 years – you know the Darby and Joan kind that get reported in the paper – as loveful? What about the person who wins several prizes at once in Lotto? Isn’t he luckful? (If ever I have occasion to possess a Lotto ticket, I can always be described by the more familiar ‘luckless.’)

And don’t we often wish that politicians were more speechless than speechful, letting us a truthful earful?

Isn’t it curious that we describe certain kinds of sunless rooms as airless, when in fact only a vacuum can be airless. All rooms are airful, though not all are sunful.

One of the most commonly used adjectives is ‘awful,’ which is a shortened form of what used to be a word of great strength: ‘awe-ful,’ meaning full of awe. It would be far more accurate to describe most awful things these days by the opposite adjective. We should be using that awkward little squashed down word, ‘awless.’

Turning to another awless area of life, dentists must  be pleased that we are toothful rather than toothless. Equally, chiropodists should be pleased with footful people – even if they are wearing footless tights or fingerless gloves. (Actually haven’t you thought how much more couth it would be to give someone a fingerful rather than a fistful? Though I’m usually pretty fistless when it comes to such occasions.)

I’m sure the peaceful would like to see a lot more hateless people around them, while most mothers would be grateful for willess children, rather than grateless and wilful ones. (When you use the word ‘willess,’ however, you can see why it’s never really made the grade.)

Actually I was being truthless when I said that I’d made a lengthy study of this matter. These endful curiosities first distracted me in the middle of listening one morning at church to an otherwise interesting sermon.

It was there that I saw we’ve managed to retain some twin words. Even in our less than Godful society we still have sinful and sinless, faithful and faithless, graceful and graceless, joyful and joyless, fearful and fearless.

How come all these kept their partners, when lustful has no lustless, or topless no topful, or bottomless no bottomful? (The mind boggles.)

I guess they were successful instead of successless.

P.S. I didn’t do all this on my own – my daughter helped me listfully.

 

Darby and Joan statue in the ward of Ancoats and Beswick, UK
courtesy Oliver Dixon

I don’t remember ever seeing the Story of English series again on those video recordings. No doubt by the time we got a VCR, they’d gone AWOL on us – or we'd unwittingly copied over them.

It occurs to me, now, that patients wearing footless tights would actually be helpful to a chiropodist, and the way I write about Darby and Joan marriages here makes it sound as though they're rare. But no longer: even my own marriage is into its 52nd year. 

In case the minds of American readers are boggling, they should note that the spellings are all British ones, as is normal in New Zealand, where this piece first appeared.

The value of creativity

 Some years ago I read Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope, and found it a great book overall.   

One morning I was reading it in the bath and had a kind of ‘understanding’ about what he was saying.

He talks all the time about how Jesus’ Resurrection opens the door for us to be resurrected too, but not just that, it enables us to live in the new heaven and new earth that God will bring about in due course. There is hope both in the future and here in the now. The now suddenly has much greater importance than many Christians give it credit for. I knew this already, in a sense, because I’ve long been a believer in the fact that we will be resurrected and live in a home that is like this earth only much greater. We will truly be at home.

But something else hit me: over last few months I’d been ‘tidying up.’ Tidying up things like getting my favourite watch repaired, getting two pictures sorted out, one to be framed for the first time and another to be reframed. Tidying up my music, and thinking about printing out the drafts of two novels so I could do some real work on them, instead of letting them slide. Writing new music for another concert. Getting the computer fixed so that it worked properly. Having one of my daughters and her four-year-old son come to live with us long term, upstairs, filling the space in the house left after my mother’s death. 

I thought that perhaps I was doing all this because I had an unconscious premonition that I might not have long to live. Then it occurred to me (thanks to Mr Wright) that these are all things that show hope. I wasn’t doing all these because of gloom, or wanting to clean up things for an imminent death (even though that’s always a possibility), but because I had hope: the watch was worth fixing, the pictures were worth hanging, the computer was worth getting repaired and upgraded.

And it was wonderful that morning to have life in the house again, with a four-year-old banging and crashing around in the morning, because daylight saving hadn’t affected him yet! 

None of these things are ‘utterly’ important in any eternal terms – there are of course far more important things – but they were still important. 

The watch continued to convey meaning in itself because it was a particular gift from my wife.

The two pictures had special meaning for us: we’d bought one early in our marriage, as a couple. Only a few weeks before my revelation in the bath the picture had fallen off its hook in the middle of the night. It would have fallen on our heads if ‘by chance’ we hadn’t moved the bed to a different place in the room a week or two earlier.

The other picture was a detailed brass rubbing my wife did when she went to England with our oldest daughter. For many years it had been carefully rolled up to avoid creases. Now might be the time to show it in all its glory.

The creative things were important, not because they focused on me, I realised, but because they’re part of God’s output through me. He doesn't ‘use’ me as a channel: He’s given me the ability to create ‘on his behalf’ – to put it rather badly. 

Perhaps through Wright’s book, and through my own reflections, I was finally getting some sense of why I do creative things, and why they’re worth doing.