Biblical Witnessing

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to "witness" to people in a biblical sense. I've heard the term thrown around a lot amongst the church, and unfortunately I find it to be mostly a christian buzz word. I'd put it right up there with "righteousness" as one of the more common terms used without much thought. Let's take a look at a passage from Isaiah.

⁸ Lead out those who have eyes but are blind,
who have ears but are deaf.
⁹ All the nations gather together
and the peoples assemble.
Which of their gods foretold this
and proclaimed to us the former things?
Let them bring in their witnesses to prove they were right,
so that others may hear and say, “It is true.”
¹⁰ “You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD,
“and my servant whom I have chosen,
so that you may know and believe me
and understand that I am he.
Before me no god was formed,
nor will there be one after me.
¹¹ I, even I, am the LORD,
and apart from me there is no savior.
¹² I have revealed and saved and proclaimed—
I, and not some foreign god among you.
You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “that I am God.
¹³ Yes, and from ancient days I am he.
No one can deliver out of my hand.
When I act, who can reverse it?”

So God is trying to win everyone over, right? God's got this amazing book and this long history of amazing things he's done, and he knows he can back his word up. He's calling out idol worshipers from other lands to see who else out there has been able to do what he's done. Whenever they show up, he's going to put us out there against them. In the proverbial case for God, we are the witnesses he calls to the stand. We are the expert opinions, the eyewitnesses, and the character witnesses to prove God's glory. God does not need us to be all powerful, but he does use us to prove his point. When we're called to the stand of life to prove what God has done (which should be every day) we have to be confident in our testimony (there's another Christian buzz word I can clear up here) so that we can help God win the case. I never used to think of words like "testimony," and "witness" in a court sense, but that's intended imagery right there. God wants us to remember that we, in the way we live our lives, are making a case for God. The more we live our lives like we don't care, aren't confident in the word, or are too insecure to speak, the weaker of a case we make for God. Conversely, the more confident we are in God's work and the more prepared we are against cross examination, the more water our testimony will hold in the court of Earth.

Live your life as a worthy testimony. God has chosen you to prove his point, and he's not going to put you on the stand unprepared. Trust in him, seek his council, and you'll be more than prepared to play your role in his case.

I Can't Read People

Just a quick story today.

When I was younger, my Dad and I were always on the hunt for cheap video games. We'd scour garage sales, the San Jose Flea Market, and any other place we could find with used video games on the cheap. One of the places we found was a Game Crazy in Arizona where we vacationed one year. Game Crazy was in its first stages, so there weren't a lot of them around. Anyways, my Dad and I were in the store browsing the games there when a lady walked in. The lady had a rather disheveled appearance; her dark hair was frizzed about everywhere, she had a cane, her clothing looked like it was just thrown on, and she had a gigantic dog with her. She also had big black sunglasses. The lady, grabbing everyone's attention from the counter, yelled to everyone inside, "Is this the Applebee's?"

It was rather strange; this place was clearly not the Applebee's, purveyor of fine pies and family dining, this was a video game store. She was informed as such by the store clerk. "Where is the Applebee's?" the lady shouted back. I didn't really understand why she couldn't find it herself. The clerk told her to walk out the store, take a left, and walk about 200 yards down the street and she'd run smack dab into it. She left the store. What a strange occurence.

When I got into the car with both my parents when my Mom picked me up, I decided to relay the story. Even at a young age I knew this would be a fun story to tell, so I told my Mom what had happened. I told her a clueless, strange lady came in with a big dog, huge sunglasses, and an inability to distinguish Game Crazy from Applebee's. My Dad, ever the realist, threw up his hands in amazement at my inability to understand. My Dad always had a way of explaining things so that I would understand them. Once again, he had found a way to take this complex, strange affair, and break it down to the most simple solution so I, too, could see.

"Andy, she was blind."

Oooooooooooooooooh.

Short Circuits and Garden Shears

I spent a lot of my high school days inside the cramped garage of Joe's family. Joe was allowed 1/4 of the garage to play host to a veritable mini-man-cave for him and his friends. There we had an extremely small TV, an old couch, a beat up recliner, and dreams. We'd gather together many days to play video games and forget what time it was. One day, though, all that would come to an end after a misplaced snip by yours truly.

There were five of us there that day. I believe it was Joe, Kevin, Kevin's sister Lauryn, and occasional d'Artagnan Steven. We were playing the shooting game Perfect Dark which only allowed four people to play at a time. While we cycled through rounds of the game, one person had to sit out. During my turn to sit out, I set out to find things to do. I was in a garage, and as such, was able to find a lot of things to do. There were many random implements to stupidly amuse myself with, and the flavor of the day was a pair of gardening shears. As my friends played, I snipped. I didn't snip anything in particular, I just snipped the air. Don't ask why I was doing this, for there exists no such rhyme or reason. During the match, though, my snipping would go awry. Without realizing it, an errant controller cord moved itself into the path of my blades, and with one movement of my arms, the cord was cut.

Instantly, all the lights in the entire garage went black. The lightbulb at the ceiling; the LED lights from the Nintendo; all lights went out. Within a few seconds things came back on, but the Nintendo did not. It was fried. We tried a lot to resurrect that poor system, but it was all for naught. Joe, in shock from what had just occurred, simply uttered to himself, "Well, at least this will give me a chance to play Chrono Trigger" (on a different gaming console.) I thought to myself, though, that the Nintendo 64 shouldn't have been fried. I didn't understand, though, why cutting a controller cord caused such a power surge as to total the gaming console. As it turns out, there was an answer for that, too. Joe's Nintendo 64 plugged into a power strip. In that power strip was also plugged a TV, a Super Nintendo, a fan, and a game boy charger. That power strip was plugged into another power strip, which housed a similarly full array of devices. That power strip was plugged into a single socket which stemmed from the garage door motor, and the collection of strips dangled from the ceiling like an eerie skeleton hung in a closet. The resulting monstrosity was so fragile in its wiring that one link anywhere in the chain (in this case, a controller plugged into the Nintendo 64) was enough to cause a veritable grenade explosion inside the tubes, with the Nintendo 64 valiantly diving on top to save its electrical brethren.

The moral of this story, kids, is don't plug too many things into a single socket outlet. Otherwise, idiot kids will come over with garden shears and break everything, and you'll only have yourselves to blame.

Barry Bonds: Dreamcrusher

When I was about 10 or so years old, I was a member of Foster City Little League. I was on the Cardinals; a AAA team with my newfound friend, Trevor. The league held a contest, as they did in other years, to sell tickets to a San Francisco Giants game. The league got a portion of the ticket sales, and the Giants kicked in prizes for the highest sellers. Trevor and I pooled our collective sales and won that contest by selling 125 tickets to that game; pretty remarkable when I look back on it, but really most of the credit goes to my parents. We each won a bat autographed by Shawn Dunston and, along with the eight other highest selling kids, got to go down to the field before a Giants game to get autographs during batting practice.

I had a blast. Each of the players that took practice graciously came over and signed autographs for us and took pictures. I remember kids yelling out the name of each player that came over to talk to us, and I remember Stan Javier giving me the bat he cracked during practice (what a nice guy; I still have that bat, Stan.) I remember one other thing from that day; Barry Bonds dodging us. While we were getting the autograph of the aforementioned Shawn Dunston, Bonds snuck in behind us, into the locker room, to continue his pregame. In the video of that day that my Mom took, you could actually see Bonds sneaking in behind us, and me catching a quick glimpse of it. I look back on that now and try to think of what was going through his head; I guess he didn't want to deal with the kids that day. It was a pretty jerkish move, for sure.

That said, I think a lot of people take this sort of stuff into account when evaluating players like Barry Bonds athletic ability. Barry will be coming up for Hall of Fame Eligiblity soon enough, and he almost certainly won't get in now, and quite possibly ever. There's a fair case against him that he did steroids, and I can at least buy the argument for that. Unfortunately, though, I think the fact that Barry Bonds was not a real likable guy clouds people's judgment. The thought that Barry Bonds is not one of the greatest players of all time is patently ridiculous; he's verifiably the greatest hitter of all time, and only the second best player of all time because Babe Ruth was also an above average pitcher for half of his career.

This isn't a quality exclusive to Barry Bonds; I hear people talk about other athletes the same way. So and So is holding back the team because he doesn't have a winner's heart, etc. You might also hear them called a Clubhouse Cancer. The idea is that their jerkishness outweighs their ability to put runs on the scoreboard, or whatever the applicable stat is for said sport. I find it really hard to believe that someone could be a big enough jerk to make the greatest hitter of all time not valuable to a team.

What this boils down to, for me, is that athletes shouldn't be role models. We need to stop looking up to professional athletes as anything but excellent physical specimens when they don't care to be anything more than that. Some athletes do try to be more than just athletes, and in such cases, awesome. Many athletes, though, such as Bonds, just want to be awesome baseball players. I think that's just fine. We even have an awards show and museum dedicated to such players. The idea that people think he should be kept out of such a museum because he was a jerk seems pretty irrelevant, and this is coming from a guy who basically had his dreams crushed by Bonds.

Any professional writers that have a hall of fame vote out there? Vote Bonds. I don't like the guy from the one encounter I had, but he's too good of a baseball player to not be in the Hall of Good Baseball Players. We don't even need an asterisk or any such nonsense; everyone knows that Barry Bonds played in the steroids era, and if you think he did steroids, then you don't need an asterisk to tell you that. Heck, vote McGuire, Palmeiro, Rose, Jackson, and just about anyone else who is being barred for such things. We need to take the era for what it is. Plaques of players from 1890 don't have asterisks for dead balls, lack of black opposition, or anything else. We don't need this arbitrary steroid talk keeping these great ballplayers from earning their due respect.