Monday, February 05, 2007

Important Legislation Update

Apparently there is a movement in California to legislate appropriate parenting. According to this article, if legislation is passed, it would be a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine or one year in jail to spank your child who is under the age of 4. The article quotes experts who seem to be of the opinion that only parents who allow things to get out of control ever resort to spanking, and suggests alternatives to spanking. It also indicates that spanking can have no long term ill effects on a child, but some children do suffer long term effects from the experience. Interesting to me is the poll that was attached, which, at the time I read the article indicated that 89% of nearly 10,000 people who have responded think that "There's nothing wrong with an occasional spank on the butt." One can only assume that most of those respondents were not this particular legislator's constituents.

UPDATE: This article talks about new legislation that is pending in New York that will make it a crime to listen to an Ipod or talk on the cell phone while crossing a street in NYC. The impetus for this legislation apparently was the death of two individuals in Brooklyn who stepped in front of moving vehicles while listening to their tunes. I think that is essentially a case of natural selection. If you don't have the ability to listen to music and walk and look out for cars or buses, (in the street, which is where you expect to find them), then chances are if you didn't get hit by the car you were destined to succumb to something else fairly quickly.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

New Post

Giving in to peer pressure, I am compelled to post something on my blog. Why the delay in posting anything to the blog, you ask? Because I had nothing to say. I still have nothing profound to say, but I am going to say it anyway. I had a great opportunity last week to go with the Adult Mission Trip to the Valley, specifically we were working on two churches. The first was a church in a small community called PeƱitas. We were only there for a day and a half, but we were able to get quite a bit done. This was a new church building, but there were a number of things that had not been completed. The last part of the week we worked at a small church in the town of La Grulla, which is further west on the way to Rio Grande City. Our plans were to put up siding that we had bought for the church all around the outside of the older parts of the church building, but it rained all week, and we were not able to do that. So we concentrated on what we could do on the inside. The church had an annex that they had built, and it was not completed. We got to work on that, and by the end of the week, the space was completed, and ready to be used. On Friday I talked to one of the ladies of the church, who told me that they had built this annex 4 years earlier and had not been able to use it that whole time. I realized, once again, how it does not matter what our plans are, even if they are well thought out and perfectly executed,
God's plans are so much better. If not for the rain He sent that week, they would have had a church that was pretty on the outside, but still not fully functional on the inside. My prayer for each of us is that we are open to allow God to do the work He needs to do on the inside, and stop spending our time worrying so much about the appearances of the outside.