jeffrey robert lange

I don’t appreciate mindless babbling. Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which is the celebration of his life and his birth. After reading the writings of Dr. King, I have formed a high level of respect and admiration for the man. King is very observant, smart, and has a great deal of tact. Here at Valparaiso University, we had no class today, but some of us were required to attend the Convocation service held in the Chapel at 10 am and another focus session. I happily agreed to attend both of these, but I was expecting to hear something that would be thought provoking and inspirational.

My feelings are that if you bring up a problem that you must offer a solution at the very least. The solution does not need to be completely perfect, but it must make some sense. Maybe an example will help clear up my point.

Everyone knows that we need to end world hunger, but what good comes from restating this ordeal to educated college students? We all know it is a problem. If you want to be respected by an audience, it is imperative that you propose a solution to the problem you mention. I can only remember one sentence that gained my interest in the whole keynote speech at the convocation ceremony.

On the other hand, I have five fingers. (I have always wanted to say that, and who says I can’t have a sense of humor? It’s my blog!) But seriously, Prof. Stephen Marc did an excellent job at attaining my attention, and I have a great deal of respect for the man.

What I am not saying is that Dr. Carruthers is a bad person, a bad speaker, or a non-important person. What I am saying is that the speech that she gave this morning was not what I had expected and let me down. I feel that others from the University feel the same way as well.

“They don’t build things like they used to. That piece of junk only lasts 6 years, then its garbage.” It’s true; things aren’t made the way they used to. Cars rust, socks get holes in them, batteries don’t last, and pillows lose their fluff. But was this ever different? Granted, quality turned from a selling point into a hassle. 2 words: disposable camera. Things aren’t made to last anymore.

Humans follow suit. We don’t last forever. We all pass away at some point in time. But was this intended? Did God want us to be like Peter Pan and live in Neverland, ceasing to age? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. The next logical question is why did this change? Who messed up paradise? In the account of Genesis, we see Adam and Eve bring disarray into the world by eating of the forbidden fruit. But in Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, we see a different story.

Beatrice Rappaccini is the daughter of the acclaimed Giacomo Rappaccini, a famous horticulturist. The first obvious connection we can make between the Garden of Eden and Rappaccini’s Daughter is that the story mainly takes place in a garden. There are two main characters, Giovanni and Beatrice, or Adam and Eve. Most importantly, though, both stories have to do with the consequences of our bad decision(s).

We can see the result of Eden in our daily lives. We see people that don’t live forever, endure pain, and, most of the time, hate work. We see how things break, crumble, and fall totally apart. But is it our fault? Did we do this to ourselves, or was it just the master plan of the grand puppeteer? In the case of Beatrice, it seems like it’s her fate to be around the plants. She doesn’t ever say that she wants to leave the garden, but how would she know anything else besides what her father set up for her? In my opinion, she didn’t really know what she was missing until it was too late.

The last thing that I got out of Rappaccini’s Daughter was a message to parents; future and present. Don’t force you child to do anything that isn’t important. To explain a little better, it’s okay to force your kid to be grounded for a week, but not for his/her whole life. After all, we only have so much time on this earth.

Yes, I believe that they can. From a purely Biblical perspective, creation (or intelligent design) took place in 6 twenty-four hour days. So overall, the creation of everything took 6 days times 24 hours. Genesis says that God created things using his Word. It says that he spoke, and things appeared, but what it doesn’t say is how matter came about. So, for all practical purposes, God could have used a “big bang” to create matter prompted by his word, and then sort it out later on the rest of the days. Another spin is that god used a “big bang” to create everything that is not described for us in Genesis. The only thing that is described how it is made is man. God could have also used a “high-speed” form of evolution that only took a few hours for the whole evolution process to take place, but this seems highly unlikely. Email me if you have more questions.

As children, we learn to share. We learn to wait our turn and stand in line. As a younger sibling, I always had to share with my sister. I can even remember sharing Lego’s way back in kindergarten. Kids are considered brats if they don’t share properly. As I have gotten older, more and more possessions have become “mine”. I don’t share as much as I used to. Sure, the TV belongs to everyone in the house, but when I’m watching something, I almost always hog the TV. Same story with the computer, too. Have I become a brat? I don’t know.

Has America adopted an idea of not sharing after the age of 8? I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve shared anything, besides food. Sure, there’s file sharing online, most of which is illegal. If you do need to share a computer, now they allow us to avoid sharing by having our own personal accounts with an exclusive desktop and configuration.

We can’t be expected to share everything, though. I don’t think anyone would have a problem with having their own clothes, soap, or bed. Sure, sharing those things might be necessary, and, heck, I’ve had to share soap before. Has it become the norm to have your own room, computer, bed, TV, and car? Even if it is practical, why do we need our own everything?

Social Networks connect lots of people together. Some really popular examples are MySpace and Facebook. These networks help you keep in touch with your existing friends and make new friends in your area or around the world. I must admit that I love Facebook and MySpace for keeping in touch with my friends from school, work, and people that I’ve met through the years. Although these networks seem to be all good, there are some downsides to them. I know plenty of people that are extremely addicted to Facebook. I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it just doesn’t seem right. My usual game plan is to check all of my stuff, like email, MySpace, and Facebook, all within an hour. Yes, some people have a lot of friends, but you don’t have to be best friends with everyone, people. I would be the first one to tell you that it’s easier to talk to people online. Some skills need to be learned, and people skills are one of the skills you need to actually partake in. Then you have the weird people that try to add you as a friend 50 times a week, or the sluts that keep on trying to seduce you into sin. I can’t stand it when creeps try to add me as a friend. Another thing that gets on my nerves is when people compete to try to get as many “friends” as possible. Nobody has 16,000 friends. Seriously. My personal MySpace is at http://www.myspace.com/jeffcrete and may not have the coolest layout, but that’s fine with me.

digg story

I don’t really want to talk about this, but the last week has compelled me to cover this topic. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a sob story. I don’t want tons of emails about how you are sorry for me. What I want you to get out of this is to understand where I’m coming from and what happened.

My friend Jay Brenner passed away on April 18th from a rare form of cancer. This hit me hard. I wasn’t able to attend the wake on Friday night because I had a baseball game and I would have had to drive quickly to get up to Michigan and actually spend some quality time with the family. I was, however, able to go to the funeral on Saturday the 21st. I had lots of time to spend with Mr. and Mrs. Brenner, and with Jay’s older sister, Stefanie. The service went really well, and I felt much better after the Christian funeral, and hopefully I helped to comfort the family and friends. After the service was over, it was a short trip back to Valparaiso, IN. We went there to visit my uncle (my mom’s sister’s husband) in the hospital. My parents told me that I didn’t need to go in, so I just hung out with my sister, who lives out there. My dad and I went home Saturday night so that we could go to church together on Sunday.

After we got home around 10:40 am, I saw a new call on the phone. It was my aunt’s number. My dad called her back and found out that my uncle passed away earlier that Sunday morning. He was 62. At this point in time I didn’t really know what to feel. School was hard on Monday and Tuesday (today). This has given me a whole new scope on life, having not really been affected by any family deaths in my lifetime.

As a Christian, I turned to God’s Word for some help. I knew what was going to happen to their bodies. The Bible says in Genesis 3:19 that,

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

But what happens to them after they die? Is there an after-life? If there is, what happens and why? Lucky for us, God tells us exactly what will happen to us. After we die, our soul leaves our body. If we are a Christian, our soul goes to heaven, if we are not a Christian, our soul goes to hell. A Christian is someone who believes that Jesus Christ is their Savior. He died on the cross to take away your sins. Through this, we have eternal life in God and in heaven.

I know for a fact that Jay is in heaven. I know that my uncle, John Fordham, is in heaven. As a Christian, I cried, but after I’m done crying, I have the sure hope that their souls are in heaven. What a great hope to have!

Here’s what Jay’s sister, Stefanie, had to say.

“This morning at 1:50 AM, my one and only amazing and courageous little brother was called home to heaven. His life ended after an 11 month and 3 day battle with a very aggressive form of bone cancer. I can only imagine what he’s doing right now, in heaven. All the sights to behold, the praises to sing, to see God’s glory in person. I can only imagine. Now Jay gets to see all that for himself. Apparently God needed him more than we did. We may not know why, we may not be able to see the “bigger picture,” but we know that God has a purpose and a reason for everything that He lets happen to us. We just have to trust that everything will work out for our good, just like He tells us it will. But we do know that Jay is now happy and pain free. He used to tell us that the only thing he wanted was to go back to the beginning, before this whole ordeal started, and just have things back to the way they used to be. Of course that never happened, but one of his classmates asked today, “Why him?” and was given the answer, “Because HE was the one God knew would be able to fight, to remain strong.” And he did, right to the very end. He never waivered in his faith, and his testimony to all that knew him and learned of him is one of the most powerful evangelism tools I’ve ever known. Please keep our family, friends, acquaintances, etc in your thoughts and prayers as we begin to try and heal the gaping hole Jay has left in our hearts.”

I think most of us know what happened to Imus, the radio announcer. As of right now, he has been dropped from CBS and his MSNBC simulcast. Imus was dropped because of some racist remarks he made.

As a Christian, we are to be forgiving. If someone is truly sorry for something they did, they should be forgiven. This doesn’t mean that you get pardoned from your punishment. Punishment is there to help us stay in line and deter us from making bad decisions. I believe that everyone deserves a second chance. As humans, things sometimes slip or come out wrong. I understand that.

Imus, however, has a history of making racist remarks. This is not acceptable. I can understand why so many companies have pulled their commercials from his show, because if I was a business that had a commercial on during his show, it would seem like my company supported his beliefs, which it doesn’t.

Sometimes the media screws everything up. If someone slips, (or sins) we shouldn’t go and tell everyone about it. That makes you seem like you have a vendetta against them. What you should do is meet with the person who offended you one-on-one. This way you can talk about your feelings and the best way to resolve the issue

A role as a public radio announcer puts you in a different position, though. It’s his job to talk. You can’t say things like he did on the public air-waves. That’s all I have to say about this.

Let me first start out with a little story to catch your imagination. There is a girl that lives in a perfect world. Every day is happy. Every day is exactly what you would want it to be. When you wake up, everything is great. You have just gotten the best sleep of your life, but that’s how it is every night. All of your work is done because someone else does it for you. A nice hot meal is ready on the table for you. Sounds good right about now, doesn’t it?

By now you have the picture in your mind, the picture of perfection. It would be really nice if you had all of these things. I’m sure that we would all appreciate it. But the girl in our story doesn’t. Why? Because she has never seen anything different. Perfection is the only thing that she has ever known. Every day that she has been alive has been perfect. She doesn’t know what fail, bad, pain, or suffering means or what they feel like. If I was to give the girl something perfect, eh, so what. That’s just the norm for her.

Ok, enough with our little story. If I was to give you, yes you, $100, you would probably thank me. Why? Because you either need or want that money. Things are probably popping into your head of what you could do with the extra cash. There have been times in your life that haven’t been the best, and money was a little tough to come by. You would remember those tough times (even if they were happening right now) and appreciate what I am doing for you. With pain, you see how good you have it when you get something nice. You appreciate because of pain.

Now, let’s say (again, totally hypothetical situation here) that I gave you a mansion that’s totally paid for and I pay the taxes and all the utilities. You don’t have to pay anything. You might reject this gift because it seems to good to be true. I don’t want anything back for this gift, and actually, there is nothing you can do to pay me back. People would go crazy and start lining up to get these free houses. (Since this is a hypothetical situation, there are no real estate agents or other workers that would go out of business with me doing this. No bad comes from this gift.) All of the news stations would be reporting about how to get these free houses and probably a little background information on me. It would almost be impossible for you to not tell all of your family and friends about this remarkable gift.

Well, let me tell you about a person that loves you a lot. This person sent his son to die for you. How many friends do you have that would do that? And this son wasn’t bad, he was perfect. If you had a kid and he or she was perfect, I don’t think you would try to save someone by killing him. Now some of you know where I’m going with this, and if you don’t, it’s ok, there are BILLIONS of people just like you. Just let me get into some important information.

This person that loves you a lot, and that sent his son to die for your sake, his name is God. His son, his name is Jesus Christ. Christmas is coming up pretty soon, which reminds me, I need to do my shopping pretty soon. Anyways, Christmas isn’t about Santa, or Rudolph, or fancy trees, or anything like that. Christmas, my friend, is the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth. If you want to learn more, go to the WELS website at http://www.wels.net or email me.