The tax code shrinketh?

One of the book sets I have to update from time to time is the United States Code Service (USCS), which only the Civil District Attorney’s office keeps. Today I got to work and found on my desk a box of new USCS volumes. These particular volumes were six books on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, so I’m guessing it was the whole of our federal tax code. I was encouraged when I removed the 2008 volumes and replaced them with the new ones because the new volumes were noticeably thinner, and in fact, when I shelved the new ones there was still a gap large enough that an additional book could have fit there.

We’re less than two weeks from the inauguration of a President who has all but promised tax increases for some (i.e. people less likely to vote for Democrats), proposed a myriad of tax “credits” for others (i.e. transfers of wealth to favored groups of people, most of whom don’t pay income taxes to begin with, and who are statistically more likely to vote for Democrats), and whose economic policies seem influenced more by class warfare and some vacuous (and unconstitutional) idea of “fairness” than by an actual knowledge of basic economics. So if I can take some encouragement in anything I’ve seen at work this week, it’s that I removed six volumes of Internal Revenue Code and replaced them with six new volumes of significantly smaller breadth. Does that mean our tax code has shrunk significantly in the past year? I don’t know, but I can’t think of any other reason those six books would be so much smaller than they were the last time I shelved them, and any time our tax code shrinks rather than grows in a given year, that is a good thing, in my opinion.

vacuous church signs of the week

The award goes to two churches I drove by this past weekend.

1) The Clifton (Texas) Church of Christ, whose sign displayed the following quote when I drove past it on Friday: “If you pause to think, you’ll have cause to thank.”

It’s hardly original (a Google search for that term brings 203 results) and has been featured on any number of church signs before, I’m sure. In fact, on this page there’s a picture of a church sign bearing that quote, and at the bottom of the page the writer has added these words: “This sign reminds us to be thankful. But it also implores us to be contemplative about our position and blessings. It’s a reminder to be thankful, but it’s also a reminder of why we should be thankful.”

I don’t know what sign the writer was reading when he or she wrote that, but it surely doesn’t describe the quote “If you pause to think, you’ll have cause to thank”, at least not as it is written. To get any meaning of that kind out of it you’d have to read into it some deeper intended meaning, because the phrase itself says very little. Not only is it not a reminder of why we should be thankful, it says nothing about what we should be thankful for or (more importantly) who we should be thankful towards. Perhaps the fact that it was on a church’s sign will be enough for some to read a deeper intended meaning into it, but what would one think of such a statement if they saw it written on, say, a bathroom wall, or scribbled on a piece of scratch paper? Removed from a church’s sign and written anywhere else, the sentence would appear as empty as it really is, because it sounds quasi-profound but says nothing. A good quote from, say, Corinthians or Romans about the sovereignty and grace of God should have a quite different effect anywhere it is written.

I’m constantly amazed by how many churches there are which, when choosing quotes or statements to put up on their signs for public view, just can’t bring themselves to use actual scripture verses, and instead opt for vacuous “feel-good” statements that essentially any semi-spiritual person could agree with. A good choice for this time of year might have been Matthew 1:21, “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” (NKJV) Now that’s a verse that reminds us of who we should be thankful towards and why. Churches (and the unsaved public who might happen to read their signs as they drive by) will be much better served if their signs are used to actually proclaim the Gospel, by posting actual scripture and losing the puns, oh-so-clever rhyming schemes, and feel-good psychobabble.

2. Victorious Life Church in Robinson, Texas (just southeast of Waco off of I-35), which displays an ostentatious banner that advertises “30 minute worship!” In fact, you can even reach the church’s website by visiting 30minuteworship.com.

Lest you be lead to think that the 30 minutes refers to their praise and worship time and not the entire service, the site provides a breakdown of the 30 minutes: Worship (10 minutes), Word (12-15 minutes), and Response (5 minutes). They use terms like “innovative” and “cutting edge” to describe their worship, as if a congregation simply singing praise to God is old hat and must be infused with innovation and the newest, hottest, and rockin’-est worship tunes out there today in order to be relevant.

I also worry about any church that provides child care for children from ages “birth-12″. These days especially, those early years are too precious to be wasted by sending your kids to “trained personnel in our children’s areas who provide a safe Christian learning environment”, when an actual church service should be the very definition of a “Christian learning environment”. What kind of kids will be turned out of a church like this, one which allows kids up to age 12 (the age most kids will be when they begin junior high) to spend their Sunday mornings not hearing God’s word preached but around other kids in a “safe Christian learning environment”? 12 years is far too long for someone to attend a church without the benefit of hearing sound preaching, much less kids spending their first 12 years of life without sitting with their parents in a corporate worship setting.

Just my two cents.

Can marriage get to one’s head?

A friend I’ve known for essentially my whole life got married early in March, after about a yearlong courtship and a 5 month engagement. He and his bride are quite the bubbly, happy couple. In fact, they’d been married barely a month when they announced they were expecting their first child in December, which prompted this response from an anonymous source: “That’s what you call hitting the first pitch.”

Marriage, I’m sure, has a way of changing people, in ways both subtle and obvious. My friend seems to have changed in at least a few noticeable ways. His birthday came on a Wednesday in late March and I went to talk to him after church that night because I had a gift for him. I kinda jumped into a conversation he was having with another guy, wherin he ended a sentence with the phrase, “that kinda sucks”, or something similar to that anyway. My jaw almost dropped because he’d always made a point to avoid using even the most seemingly harmless of potentially rude words, “sucks” in particular. In fact, I remember a Sunday when I was probably about 11 or 12 and having a lunchtime football conversation with some friends at church and his mother got really upset and told my mom when she overheard me say “sucks”, a word which, if memory serves, was preceded by, “Dan Marino”.

So it was, in its own way, shocking when my friend said that. I turned to the guy he was talking to and said, “did he just say ’sucks’”? My friend chuckled and responded, “Yeah. And I say ‘crap’ now too!” Hmm, where are his standards going? One day you get married, have your first kiss, and lose your virginity, then before the month is over you’ve started saying “sucks” and “crap”? Is there a pattern here?

Sportswriter Bill Simmons coined the term “I’m Keith Hernandez” status, which was named after a memorable scene in a legendary episode of Seinfeld. In the scene, pro baseball player Keith Hernandez goes out on a date with Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and it ends with the following bit of dialogue:

ELAINE: Well, thanks for a nice evening. It was really fun.
KEITH: Yeah, it was. [mind] Gosh, should I kiss her good night?
ELAINE: [mind] Is he going to try to kiss me?
ELAINE: I love Cajun cooking.
KEITH: Really, you know my mom’s one quarter Cajun.
ELAINE: Uh, my father’s half drunk. ha ha ha ha
KEITH: Maybe they should get together. [mind] Go ahead. Kiss her.
I’m a baseball player dammit.
ELAINE: [mind] What’s he waiting for? I thought he was a cool guy.
KEITH: [mind] Come on I won the MVP in 79. I can do whatever I want to.
ELAINE: [mind] This is getting awkward.
KEITH: Well, goodnight
ELAINE: Good night
[they kiss - REALLY KISS]
ELAINE: [mind] Who does this guy think he is?
KEITH: [mind] I’m Keith Hernandez.

Thus, “I’m Keith Hernandez” status is reached when an athlete, beloved by the fans and possessing of great skill, reaches a ridiculous level of self-confidence and believes that he can do anything –  especially things that lesser athletes couldn’t get away with – and it will be okay because he’s a superstar and he can do that. Just like Keith Hernandez saying in his mind, “Come on, I won the MVP in ‘79. I can do whatever I want to.”

In a similar vein, a newly married man might start doing things and saying certain things unashamedly that he never would have done before, thinking “Come on, I’m married. I’ve left my father and mother and I’m leading a new family now! I’m free. I can say whatever I want to!”

After a lifetime of shying away from saying things as mild as “sucks” and “crap”, he’s suddently started using those words. He’s a prolific photographer and he posted several Facebook albums worth of pictures from his honeymoon trip, one of which included a picture of his wife holding up (and giving a thumbs-up to) the book Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage. Not a hint of awkwardness there on his part, and even his sister responded with “good grief”. And this week he announced his wife’s pregnancy by posting a picture on facebook of her positive pregnancy test stick, predictably prompting comments like “ok, that’s gross”, “wow…?”, and “Err..yeah…that’s…yeah…”

Has this whole marriage thing totally gotten to his head? Should we call this “I’m leading my own household now” status? I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with any of those things in the previous paragraph, but it just goes to show how marriage might give you a sense of freedom and strip you of a lot of awkwardness and inhibition you had before. That being said, I hope I don’t suddenly become that open after getting married, whenever that ends up happening.

Administrative Assistants Day

I’ve had some very slow afternoons at work the past couple of weeks. I’ve spent some of them filling out the daily sudoku puzzles in the local newspaper, some trying to read whatever book I have with me (I finally finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union last week), and just generally fighting off sleep in whatever way I can. I have a relative (a first cousin once removed) who works in the same building I do in the afternoons, so sometimes I’ll take a break and go upstairs and chat with her a bit. She works in the District Attorney’s office, a place to which I have to go at least once a week to deliver a weekly legal newsletter. I went upstairs to the DA’s office today and found their conference room strewn with plates of cookies, from which I was encouraged to help myself by one of the guys who works at the front desk. A sign outside the conference room informed people that it was “Administrative Assistant’s Week”, which I am told is celebrated the last full week of April, with the Wednesday of that week being Administrative Assistant’s Day.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the punctuation in that name. Is it a celebration for one assistant or many? I tried to search online for a proper format, and found references to it either written like that or without an apostrophe. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, since other holidays have names that seemingly can be either plural or possessive (i.e. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Veterans Day) but are one or the other for reasons unknown to me. There was a genuine typo farther down the sign, where it announced that they would be celebrating the day from “2 o’clock – 4:30″. Just pick one way of writing the time and stick with it. I love government signmakers. The cookies were good by the way, though I’m almost certain they came from Target.

In other news, the manager at the law library was doing close-out at the end of the day and when he was taking the day’s money out of the public copy machines, he ran across a huge cockroach. He decided he didn’t need to check the coin box for any coin change that may have gone into it, so he ended up closing and locking the machine with the cockroach still inside. We were both scratching our heads at that one. How did a cockroach that big get into there? Why haven’t we seen other cockroaches if one that big managed to not only get into the building but also find its way into the law library and into a copy machine’s money taker? I called a co-worker at the civil law library about that and we both had a laugh about that, among other things. I expressed doubt that a cockroach could live long inside of there, since there shouldn’t be anything in there it could eat, to which my co-worker said he’d heard on a documentary that cockroaches can live for two weeks off of a single fingerprint. Weird! If that’s true then it’s the most interesting thing I’ve learned this week.

Just another day at your local government law library.

I am repetitive with great repetition

During yesterday’s morning service at church the passage that was read in preparation for the sermon was Zechariah 8. It has a bit of repetition that almost made me laugh when it was read. Zechariah 8:2 reads, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I am zealous for Zion with great zeal; with great fervor I am zealous for her.’” (NKJV)

 

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “zealous” as: “Filled with or motivated by zeal; fervent.” So, essentially that verse says “I am zealous for Zion with great zeal; with great fervor I am fervent for her.” By that logic, you also could have just replaced “zealous” and “zeal” with “fervent” and “fervor”, and vice versa.

Perhaps the English translation doesn’t adequately convey what was meant with the seeming repetetiveness of the verse, but I was still amused by the part about being zealous with great zeal, which I imagine is kind of like being “swift with great speed”, or saying that one “works vigorously with great vigor”.

 

Neither of those would have described me this morning. I sneezed several times this morning when I was getting ready for the day, so I took a Benadryl before I left to drive to work. It was a very strong Benadryl apparently because I’d been at work less than a half hour before I began feeling very tired and weak, as if I could keel over at any minute. I haven’t sneezed once at work though (actually, I did about a minute after typing this sentence), and the effects of the Benadryl have gradually worn off so I feel quite a lot better and more awake now.

 

 

Note: I later looked up how that verse is phrased in a few other translations, and some of them substitute “jealous” in place of “zealous” and some use “wrath” instead of “zeal”. The New American Standard Bible puts it: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I am exceedingly jealous for Zion, yes, with great wrath I am jealous for her.’” Most of the popular translations put it in ways similar to that. The paraphrased versions, however, make Zechariah 8:2 sound flippant and, at best, oversimplified, as they do to countless verses. Here is that verse in the Contemporary English Version: “I love Zion so much that her enemies make me angry.” 

 

The Message’s paraphrasing of it is reason #926 why that book is little more than useless: “A Message from God-of-the-Angel-Armies: ‘I am zealous for Zion—I care! I’m angry about Zion—I’m involved!’” You’re kidding me, “God-of-the-Angel-Armies”??? What part of “the Lord of hosts” (NASB, NKJV) or “the Lord Almighty” (NIV) is so hard to understand that it cries out to be so overly paraphrased? Also, how is a new believer or a curious unbeliever likely to view God if they read a book – one claiming to accurately paraphrase scripture – which ascribes to the Lord God such benign phrases as “I care!” and “I’m involved!” when the verse those come from it is supposed to be understood as something much deeper than a statement that could just as easily be a politician’s campaign slogan?