Dog Fighting 101: Fido Bite Fido

So there's been a recent uproar regarding high profile sport celebrities and their alleged participating in sponsoring dog fights.

Generally I believe that good people are kind to their animals, but I'm a bit disturbed at the media circus being generated by the allegations. On the scale of human evil, I'm not sure dog fighting scores very well. Even on the scale of celebrity (or even sports figure) evils, dog fighting?

How about worrying about sports figures who, I don't know, commit violent actions against other people or are convicted felons? Or perhaps the child slave traders or pornography produces could use some well directed outrage? Or women-abusers?

Here's a thought: Dog fighting is bizarrely yet fascinatingly cruel. Outrage is an excuse for interest in something new and different. "Sports figure beats woman" isn't new news: We have plenty of people beating others up. But we're short on celebrities who dog fight - and none of our friends sponsor dog fights - so it's news.

A pastor once commented to me that what really saddened him was the amount of verbal violence he saw in Christian homes: Parents who wouldn't let their children see movies or TV would sit at the dinner table and destroy each other with their words.

I wonder if we're not genuinely concerned with finding great evil and eliminating, or finding evil near us and destroying it. We're certainly not concerned with identifying and ridding ourselves of our own evil. But dog fighting - that certainly should be banned.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary...How does your garden grow?

I'm a bad gardener. Or maybe I'm an alright gardener - I at least water my plants. But I've discovered several very bad mistakes I've made:

First, I don't know what I planted. I bought this bag o' seeds and planted it - but I don't know what any of the plants are supposed to look like.

Secondly, I over-crowded my garden. The seeds were supposed to cover 500 sq ft: My garden is about 100 - and yes, all the seeds are in it.

Third, I let the weeds grow with my plants (and fourth, I don't know what weeds look like either).

So now after a couple months, I have a tangle of a garden. It has some pretty flowers, but the poor plants are nearly hopelessly intertwined. They are disfigured with extra long stalks which allow them to crawl along the ground until they find space to to point their leafy stalks at the sky. And the weeds are everywhere. I'm finally going by the "if it doesn't have flowers, it's a weed" strategy and figuring that even if a few flower plants die, the lack of congestion will do them good.

Here's a few lessons I've learned from my garden:

1. Know what you are planting. Often in life we don't think about what we want to cultivate, so we have no idea whether we're achieving it or not.

2. It's hard to tell weeds and flowers apart by the leaves. It's easier to tell them apart by whether they have flowers. The corollary: In life, it's important to know what is a leaf and what is a flower. Jesus talked about knowing trees by their fruit (not their branches or trunk or leaves); often I can't tell the difference between foliage and flowers.

3. Ignorance is not bliss - it has consequences. My garden could be so much more if I was a better gardener.

4. I should get my digital camera and take photos of my garden.

Have Blog; Need Idea

Somehow I don't seem to have any bright ideas lately for posting. I'm working on it, really I am.

Edit: Or then again, I could go read someone else's challenging yet inspiring post and ponder how to apply it to my life. It's much easier than coming up with my own.

Where Treasure, There Heart

My garden (such as it is) is flourishing. It's even attracting vicious, evil wasp type creatures. (Alright, they might be bees, but I think they are wasps.) It's been an good experience for me.

Someone (here?) was talking about how divorced we are from our need from rain. My own 20 square foot patch of lawn makes me a lot more aware of how dependent the plants are on water - and how I can't bring water - any water - down from the sky. The hose is great, but it's just not like a good rain storm. And I find myself glad to see the rain because I know it means my plants won't be drooping or dying.

I'm finding myself more grateful for the rain - and gaining (I think) a deeper appreciation of the God sending rain on both the good and the evil - how deeply beneficial rain is.

The other change I've noticed is that I'm more aware of my garden: I notice when people step in it, or my wedding table decoration plant died from heat and dehydration, or it doesn't drain right. I take the time to fix it - and it's hard to let it fall apart. I've been thinking about Jesus talking about our heart being where our treasure is: Not that our treasure goes where our heart is, but that our heart is where our treasure is. If I put time, money, and effort into the garden, my heart goes toward the garden. Likewise for politics or computer games.

[The obvious application - putting effort toward God - isn't as simple as I'd like since I show a bad tendency of treasuring religious effort and show rather than God, but that's another post.)

In other news, I survived my tumble down the stairs, and discovered that I slide rather gracefully. Sadly, though, my body isn't impervious to bruising.

Security

So lately I've been thinking about security in life. A couple friends of mine have gotten robbed. Others have unexpectedly lost loved ones.

On the practical side, I've been thinking about writing a will.

On the philosophical side, I've been contemplating what it means to not lay up treasure where moths and rust (not to mention taxes, thieves, and incompetence) can get to it.

What does it mean to use money for good? What does it mean to stand up for justice? I was reading today about companies that work change Google results to hide slander from bloggers. And perhaps for the first time, it struck me: That's a good use of technical skill: Working to protect the reputations of people.