‘Civilized Dialog’ Record Broken

Guinness World Records has reported that after thousands of years, the world record for dialogue amongst humanity has been officially broken.

Friday, July 24th 2020 marks the end of the centuries old streak of being able to communicate, sometimes even oppositionally, with fellow mankind.

At precisely 6:02 p.m. a tweet was released seemingly innocent in its claims that skunks will not stink in heaven. After a few retweets and “lol‘s” a discussion began on Facebook. The core response being that God made skunks “and all of their skunkiness” and to remove the smell post-life would indicate a mistake.

This response was not received well and a flurry of escalating tweets, memes, gifs, and posts were made that clearly established a battle line over the conflicting views.

Pouring into Youtube, Parler, Instagram, and even mainstream news outlets, the protesting is believed to have begun when CNN launched a headline titled, “This Stinks!”.

Celebrities have taken sides in the debate with former voice actor of Pepe Le Pew, Eric Bauza, taking offense at the rhetoric being hurled by so many who don’t know or understand the soul’s of the potent creatures. Meanwhile animators have created newer renditions of some of the classic cartoons where he does not smell at all, claiming that they never meant to offend anyone or anything having scent glands.

Now that the lengthy record has been put in the books and all rational dialogue has come to an end, it is speculated whether anyone will have the nerve to attempt a new record at some point in the future.

An opinion piece in the Times later pondered, “We all knew it was coming, the end of civilized dialog certainly has its place in our history, but we never knew which issue would be our last. Now knowing what we know, should we have picked a different hill to die on?”

Answering an anonymous survey, below are some of the responses to the question, ‘do you think we will begin an attempt to break the newly acquired record?’:

“If there is another opinion out there, It’s wrong! So why bother?”

“Sure, I’m open to discussion… as soon as they change their views!”

“This was the final straw, if we can tell God what He can and can’t do with stinky critters, we have no hope”.

As that record fell, a new era has begun. We aren’t sure what the record is for refusal to logically debate, engage in ignorant hate, severe intolerance, and division by opinion… but we think we can beat it.

---

Image by Vicki Roberts from Pixabay

My Wife Attacked Me With Scissors

She really did. I guess if I were to tell “her” side of the story, she was trimming hair around my ears (which makes her a saint… again, her side of the story).

Well, whichever side you believe, there was blood. Lots of it. I didn’t even feel it when she nicked my ear. It was like something out of a Mel Brooks movie. Way too much blood for such a tiny incident. It was so over the top ridiculous, I was scared to sneeze.

We tried cleaning and holding tissues to it. I gave it a good 15 minutes of holding things to it, applying pressure, etc. and figured it was good enough to jump in the shower.

When drying off, I must of grazed my ear with the towel as it was half full of blood. I cleaned it up again and tried peroxide, bandaids, tissues, weird head angles. For about 45 minutes, the blood flowed.

What started as a laughing matter began to concern me a little. We also had a clock ticking against us, we had to leave the house in 3 minutes at this point.

I started to panic. My wife was helping to try and figure out new ways of stopping the bleeding and every time she would come back in the room I would exclaim in exasperation that the bleeding hadn’t stopped yet. Each time the pitch of my voice would get higher and higher as worry and fear began to settle in.

With 3 minutes to go, I was pacing and panicked, and out of ideas. She really is a saint. She kept checking on me, trying new things, and coming up with new ideas. Finally she stopped in front of me, put her hand over my ear and began to pray.

If I’m honest, it felt silly. A tiny little nick that didn’t hurt… at worst a mild inconvenience of being late. And here we were engaging the Lord and creator of the universe.

While she poured out a heartfelt and sincere prayer, I’m thinking, “hey, I know you are dealing with wars, plagues, starving people, riots, diseases, and the devil, but if you could put all that aside for a second I’ve got this ear thing…”

What is sad to me is that I’ll be the first person to tell anyone else that no problem is too small for God. He wants to know our fears, concerns, crushes, frustrations. He is our brother and our friend. But when it comes to my own mess, I just can’t seem to get on board with it. We do the same thing in the other direction. We claim overwhelmingly that no problem is too big for God… except for what I’m dealing with right now.

Not only did I fail to follow my own advice, which I know to be true, it also never occurred to me to pray at all. Why? On multiple levels I failed. This is why psychologists can’t diagnose themselves. It’s why we can’t use ourselves as references, and it’s why mirrors are the cruelest inventions in the world.

We can’t accurately see inward. Our eyes only see in one direction. This is one of many reason why we have a church. A community of believers to help each other remember the small stuff, withstand the big stuff and to pray through all of it.

The last little bit may make some feel uncomfortable. My ear stopped bleeding. Immediately. Not even a little dried up bubble where the clot formed. There was no clot. It just stopped and dry clean skin remained. No wound. No scab. Like it never happened.

For myself, I have two questions, and I hope my lapse in judgement will help to serve as a good example for you.

1. Why didn’t I pray first?

2. Why not bring EVERYTHING before God? I firmly believe He wants us to.

For you, I have one question. Do you believe God can heal us here, now, and today? If not, ask yourself why you pray at all. Examine your prayers. Dig into the scriptures. I know an awful lot of people who pray everyday for God to be with sick, be with doctors, give comfort, etc. if you don’t believe God has power in this world, why are you praying those prayers? The very prayers Jesus taught us to pray.

“Give us bread, deliver us from evil, forgive our trespasses”. Those are actions that we request God to make in a world that we believe God is bound to be action less in. If He has the power to “guide guard and direct us” as so many of us have prayed verbatim… He has the power to remove a mass, reduce a fever, clean a blood stream, and even stop an ear from bleeding.

Or do we really believe that God can change the hearts and minds of mankind, but he can’t heal hearts and brains? Did your God flunk out of medical school and settle for bachelor’s in psychology?

I’m thankful to a God that forgives me over and over and over again. I’m thankful for His patience while I pray as a last resort when He intended it to be my first. And I’m thankful that He cares about me enough to care about what I care about, even if it would make most of us shrug.