Pick it up and read it!

No, I don’t mean the Bible, although I read it every day.

But for now, I’m referring to the newspaper.

“Ahh, the newspaper,” you say. “You mean that old dinosaur of the printed era that’s somehow managed to stay alive, despite its shrinking advertising revenue and a dwindling subscriber base?”

Despite rumors of its demise, the newspaper is surviving and in some instances, thriving.

I know that’s the exception and not the norm. According to a 2010 Harris Poll, 1 in 10 American adults say they never read a daily newspaper, and only 2 of 5 read a daily newspaper, either online or in print.

That’s really not surprising, since Americans read less today. According to a 2007 study by the National Endowment of the Humanities, reading levels among young adults has plummeted over the last two decades. The average person between ages 15 and 24 spends 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day watching TV and 7 minutes reading.

So, I was shocked but probably shouldn’t have been when I read that The Times- Picayune, the paper of New Orleans, La., established in 1837 and winner of several Pulitzer Prizes, will scale down its print edition to three days a week this fall, as will several other newspapers owned by its parent company.

Newspapers have long been a part of my life. Many times, after a day in elementary school, I would wait on my front porch for the afternoon delivery of the Altus Times-Democrat. We subscribed to several newspapers. Back then, the Daily Oklahoman had a morning edition as well as an evening edition, The Oklahoma City Times. I devoured both, as well as the morning edition of The Lawton Constitution. Occasionally, Dad would purchase the Times Record News of Wichita Falls, TX, but I looked with skepticism upon anything from the Longhorn State.

Sunday afternoon, having feasted on Mom’s delicious pot roast, was given to reading the newspaper. My brothers and father would divide out the sections of the paper, and soon they would be strewn about the den, one section on the couch, another across the recliner, each waiting to be read by one of us.

Today, I subscribe to several newspapers and whenever I’m visiting another town or city, I make sure to get a local paper, for each has its unique features reflective of its constituency.

Newspapers keep me aware of the world in which I happen to live.

As blogger Tracey Dickerson has noted, it was the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, who in an interview with Time Magazine in 1966, advised young theologians “to take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”

Barth was reminding believers that although they are not to be of the world, they are yet in it, and as such, they should know the world in which they live. Moreover, Christians should be a discerning, reflective people.

But believers certainly haven’t cornered the market on thinking. Whether you think like a theologian or are simply a thinker, the newspaper can stimulate your mind to a broader awareness of what’s going on in the world around you, whether it’s news about the local community, municipal government, available jobs, the nation, or broader geo-political issues that affect us all, often unknowingly.

Of course, when Barth spoke those words, the internet didn’t exist, nor did CNN or Fox News. We have access to news 24/7, through dozens of portals, more news than we can digest.

It shouldn’t be a question of either/or but an affirmation of both the internet and the printed page.

The question we must ask ourselves is, what’s the quality of the news reports we are getting? Are we receiving information based on thorough investigative reporting?

It’s easy to watch any number of news talk shows. I do on occasion. While interesting, and often hosted by knowledgeable and talented people, they are usually, by the very nature of the ratings race, skewed toward drama, hype, and superficiality.

The challenge for newspapers is to provide the financial resources for quality reporting, whether it’s reporting by a local or regional paper or one of the major dailies.

How then can newspapers survive? Billionaire Warren Buffett, who is in the process of purchasing 26 daily newspapers and has had success with others, writes that newspapers fail when one more of the following factors are present: (1) the town or city has more than one competing dailies, (2), the newspaper is no longer the primary source of information for the readers, (3) or the town or city does not have a “pervasive identity.”

Surviving and even thriving is a challenge, but it’s worth the try, and that brings me back to Karl Barth. I’ve got my Bible in one hand: I’ve read where it will last forever. It’s the newspaper which concerns me, for without it, my application of the Bible to the world would be diminished.   

Contact David B. Whitlock, Ph.D. at drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com or visit his website, www.davidbwhitlock.com

One way to save a life

He was always getting up a game of some kind, usually sandlot football.

Mark had a knack for gathering my friends and me, most of us ten years his younger, for a game of football in the fall or baseball in the spring. And he was my own personal trainer, throwing me thousands of football passes or hitting me countless groundballs, trying to make me better.

But there was more to it than the game---something much larger than that. The sport was only an avenue enabling Mark to do something far more important than catching or throwing a ball.

Before Mark made our front yard a football field or a baseball diamond, I spent most of my time with Dougie, my brother, only 18 months older than me. We were so attached as constant companions that Momma usually spoke our names as one: “Dougie and Davey, Davey and Dougie.”

Until quite suddenly on a fateful day in May, after a car wreck involving the two of us and my oldest brother, Lowell, Dougie’s short life was taken.

And after that, it was only “Davey.”

Mark gradually emerged as our neighborhood coach and my personal instructor in all things athletic. Because of him, I dreamed big dreams and learned to work with others.

Mark even arranged for one of his high school football buddies to form a rival football team from another neighborhood so we could play them, which we did, giving Mark his first win as a football coach.  

So, I really wasn’t surprised when Mark announced his intention of getting his college degree in elementary education. After all, he was a natural, as was his wife, Joy, who graduated with him, both of them earning bachelors and then masters degrees in their fields. With their mutual love for kids and one another, it seemed likely that if they didn’t achieve great success, they would at least have a joyful journey.

They got both.

And some forty years later---seven as a coach and teacher and thirty-three as a principal, Mark, along with a banquet room full of teachers whose lives he had touched, gave his retirement speech.

He didn’t mention that along the way, he received the prestigious Academic Achievement Award from the State Department of Education, nor that he was named the District Administrator of the Year by the Oklahoma Association of Elementary School Principals in 1995 and 2009, nor that he was the recipient of the Oklahoma School Administrator Award in 1998-1999.

Neither did he mention that his wife, Joy, was  named Teacher of the Year from Rivers Elementary in 1993-94 and also in 2010-11, nor did he say that Joy was a grant recipient for Award Reading from the Rural Oklahoma Foundation in 2007.

All those awards weren’t really that important to Mark and Joy. What mattered was that they considered themselves privileged to invest their lives in students and teachers.

But Mark did remember to thank the teachers for their role in his journey, and when he was done, they thanked him. There was the teacher who once worked in the school cafeteria and because of Mark’s encouragement, went for it, getting her degree in education and a job at Mark’s school;  and then there was the teacher who finally got a chance to prove herself, because Mark was willing to hire her; and another teacher had lacked confidence but gained it from Mark’s support; and some, like my wife, Lori, pursued careers in education simply because of Mark and Joy’s positive example of what it is to be a teacher---educators who make a difference in others and in so doing, save some students from potential disaster, pointing them to the right path in life.

I couldn’t help but think---as teachers and friends gathered around Mark to thank him for caring enough to lead and teach those many years---how Mark had helped save another life, that of the skinny, six- year old I once was, the child who was lost without his brother. It was then that Mark stepped in and took up the slack, and in so doing helped save not just one life, but potentially many more as well, because he had learned the importance of instilling in others the hope that comes from dreaming dreams and the thrill that comes in fulfilling them en route to becoming whole and well.

And forty years down the road, that’s still one way to save a life.

What I heard in the garden

By now you’ve heard the news: We’re growing, at least physically. The average American male is seventeen pounds heavier and the average female nineteen pounds heavier than in the late 1970s. And the percentage of overweight children and adolescents in the US has nearly tripled in that same period of time.

One of the most overlooked and effective ways to fight our growing weight problem is to grow a vegetable garden.

I’m not alone in that conviction. First Lady Michelle Obama has made gardening the centerpiece of her platform for promoting a healthier diet, especially among children. Released last week, her book, American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America, chronicles her journey as a gardener and describes her plans to encourage gardening.

It’s true: You eat what you grow in a garden, and it’s healthier, fresher, and more nutritional than what you get from that drive-through window. You’ll get some exercise as you grow a garden, too.

Besides that, if you leave your cell phone in the house, you could receive an added benefit: You might hear those plants talking.

Of course, the garden doesn’t audibly speak, like the corn field that whispered to Kevin Costner. But I’ve listened, novice gardener that I am, to what those plants have had to say.

I’ve heard them telling me to slow down and get in touch with the rhythm of life. It takes time to grow food; there is no fast-food garden. When we don’t recognize that, we unknowingly fall into the trap the dark side of agribusiness offers, with its endless attempts to accelerate nature into higher and higher gears for the faster and quicker production of food, a process which finally abuses farmland and farming people, severing us from the rhythm of life, outsourcing all we do.

Those plants also tell me that their ground is a sacred ground. I try to respect that. I even made up a song for them, which I sing before my neighbors are awake, to the tune, “Rise up O Men of God.”  I greet my garden with, “Rise up, O Plants of God, ye creations of the Lord, bring forth your royal fruit to Him, and praise his name above.” (I’m still working on stanza two.)  My plants don’t laugh when I sing, and they reward my efforts with a plentiful harvest.

I love it when my plants remind me that it’s not absolutely necessary for me to have them perfectly lined up and every weed pulled for them to be fruitful. My gardening coach, Glen Sandusky, looked at a crooked garden row in my first garden, before my other gardening coach, Phil Moss, taught me to drop a line and make neat, straight rows. “Well, you can get more in a crooked row than a straight one,” Glen mused. He’s been listening to the garden for years.

My plants have told me we are connected.  And in some strange and mysterious way, I believe they are right. After all, I was there when I put the seed in the ground, brushed the dirt as the seedling first poked its head to daylight, watched it grow into a mature plant, and then enjoyed its offering of delicious delights. And I am there when it turns brown, withers and fades into the same earth in which I will one day join it, resting with it in peace.

The garden also tells me that if it’s not enjoyable, then I should do something else. Gardening is work, but if done right, it shouldn’t be drudgery. As Wendell Berry wrote in his book, The Art of the Commonplace, “The 'drudgery' of growing one's own food…is not drudgery at all. (If we make the growing of food a drudgery, which is what 'agribusiness' does make of it, then we also make a drudgery of eating and living.) It is - in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need - a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the Creation, the conviviality of one body with all bodies.”

Maybe Mrs. Obama is broaching a broader subject than simply how to maintain a healthier diet.

Perhaps the garden can tell us something about experiencing the sacredness of life in all its fullness, even as we grow the garden instead of a supersized self.

"With diploma in hand," an open letter to my son upon graduating from college

Dear Dave:

We watched as you took your diploma in one hand and shook President Roush’s hand with the other. That was a great moment for all of us, for it signified the closing of one chapter in your life and the opening of another.

 Now that you have your diploma, remember that it has meaning beyond the listing of your name, the date you graduated, and the school, Centre College, which granted the degree you earned.

First, that diploma means you are to be a thinker.  Just because you’ve earned a degree doesn’t mean you automatically know how to think or that you will continue to do so. I’ve known plenty of people who have earned degrees from prestigious schools, and having walked across the stage with their diploma in hand, never read another book, entertained a new idea, or forced themselves to stretch one mental muscle. Having isolated themselves in a cocoon of indifference, they languished in mediocrity rather than thriving in the fresh air of open-mindedness and challenge.

While your liberal arts education has given you an excellent foundation to think for yourself, you must still work at it just as diligently as an Olympic athlete trains for the games. Thinking means listening carefully to others, evaluating what’s being communicated, and asking yourself how their ideas might integrate truth into your life, or conversely, negatively impact you and the global village in which you find yourself.

Second, it means you are meant to be you and no one else. Take another look at that diploma. It only has one name on it: your own. Your education has taught you the value of being who you are. When you are not you, the world is cheated because you have unique abilities, talents, and gifts only you can give the world. You have a purpose that extends beyond yourself, but if you try to live someone else’s values instead of the ones you yourself believe in, you compromise something vital within yourself, depriving yourself of the joy that comes in being the individual you are meant to be.

Third, it means you care about others enough to give a part of yourself to them. Education, at its best, doesn’t take place in a solitary cell in an online conversation between a student and an impersonal, unknown grader.

 Those times you spent with your buddies at the fraternity house or on the intramural field, the time you gave to others on the Student Government Council, or the moments you enjoyed interacting with friends at The Campus Center, were important. They can teach you how to cooperate, work for a common goal, and have fun in the process. So much of success in life is about getting along with others and making personal sacrifices that enable others to succeed. When you do that, you yourself are succeeding.

Fourth, as you look at that diploma, remember the people that handed it to you. I do mean President Roush, of course. But I also mean others as well, people like Dr. Wyatt, who ignited your love for historical research, Dr. Lucas, who directed you in your chosen field of study, Mrs. Nash, who in second grade instilled in you a love for reading, and Mrs. Followell, the high school teacher who first encouraged you to write, and Glen Richardson and Coach Robbins, whose demands on your physical discipline helped make you mentally tough. And be grateful for all those people standing in the shadows: secretaries, teacher’s aides, administrators, custodians---people who helped in anonymous ways along your journey to the stage.

And lastly, pick up that diploma and take it with you. Take all that it represents---the learning that enlightens your mind, the friends that are now a part of you, the work that makes you strong---and tuck all that in your heart, letting those things expand your mental horizons as they light the path to your future. When you strive for that, even when you fail along the way and few if any recognize the sacrifices you’ve made, remember: You truly are a success.

And as you find your way, having walked away from the stage with diploma in hand, look back and give mom and dad a wink. .

And don’t be sad if you see a tear falling from my cheek; it will be caught by the smile on my face.

Choose your destination carefully, you might just have to stay there

“Last thing I remember, I was 
Running for the door 
I had to find the passage back 

To the place I was before 
‘Relax’ said the night man, 
‘We are programmed to receive. 
You can check-out any time you like, 
But you can never leave!’”

----The Eagles, Hotel California

My cousins had picked me up at Love Field in Dallas, TX. I was to preside at their father’s funeral the next day. After visiting with their family in their mother’s home, they drove me to my hotel.

At least I thought it was my hotel.

They had taken care of my flight plans, and my dad said I could stay in the same hotel with him, my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew.

“It’s the same hotel we stayed in last year when we were in Arlington, TX, for Brian’s wedding,” Dad emphasized.

My cousins remembered exactly where that hotel was located because they had visited us there when we in Arlington the year before.

“We’ll see you at the church in the morning,” they said as they left me at the hotel.

I tried to check in at the front desk. “I should have a room under the name of my father, L.D. Whitlock,” I told the night clerk.

“No, we have no room under that name,” she informed me.

I went down the list: my brother Mark, my nephew Brian, his wife, Mandy. There was no reservation under any of those names.

“Hmmm, I’ll just call them,” I told the night clerk.

“We’re here, waiting on you, in room 231,” Mark told me on my cell phone.

Relieved that I was in the right place, I made my way to the elevator and down the long hallway to room 231.

I knocked loudly on the door, proudly announcing my presence to my family.

And much to my surprise, a kind Oriental man opened the door.

I apologized. He smiled, bowed, and shut the door.

I’m now nonplussed and on my cell phone to my brother: “Don’t you know your own room number, Nimrod?

Still on the phone, he asks his wife, Joy, to check the room number.

“231, the number’s right here,” I hear her say.

“That can’t be right. I was just there and an Oriental man is in that room,” I counter.

“What hotel are you at?” my brother asks.

“The same one as last year, just like Dad told me.”

I now have to hold my cell phone away from my ear because my brother is howling with laughter. In fact, his son Brian told me later, Mark was on the floor in hysterics.  

Somewhere in the planning process, they had changed hotels.

“How the heck was I supposed to know?” I demanded.

And I can still hear my dear ol’ dad’s explanation in the background, “Well, I thought someone would have told him.”

Making my way back down the hallway to the elevator, and to the front desk, I can hear Don Henley and the Eagles singing, “Welcome to the Hotel California.”

But alas, the night clerk, suppressing a snicker at my plight, happily pointed me to the front door, where I could wait on my not-so-compassionate big brother to pick me up.

And later, as I got in the van with him and my nephew Brian, I was glad to be leaving a place where I didn’t belong. And I thought of how easy it had been to wind up in the wrong place.

Finding the place where you belong sometimes requires checking the sources, repeating directions, and making sure you have reliable information. It was C.S. Lewis who observed in his book, The Screwtape Letters, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one---the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Finding life as it is supposed to be, as it is truly meant to be, is like a journey. And the search itself prompts questions like, “Where are you going?” And “Who are you, really?”

That life is discovered somewhere in the admission that only One has the answers to the questions of our deepest longings---desires only satisfied by living within the Eternal Now.

The late Eastern Orthodox priest and church historian, Fr. Alexander Schmemann aptly wrote, “Eternal life is not what begins after temporal life; it is the eternal presence of the totality of life.”

As we find our place in that life, we discover we’ve been holding the key unlocking the door to true freedom all along.

No, I don’t want to stay one night in the Hotel Californian or any other place other than the place I was meant to be, a place where I can breathe in the fresh air of eternal life.

And enjoy the freedom of coming and going in the Eternal Presence forever.

When you can't say, sing it

She was struggling to tell me something but her words wouldn’t come. All she could do was mumble and that only with great frustration. I was holding her hand, trying as best I could to comfort her in her agitation.

“Could you come to the hospital as soon as possible?” Her son had called me in the early morning hour, his voice quivering. His elderly mom was not doing well: She had apparently suffered another stroke. “The last thing she told me was that she had to see her doctor. That’s how she refers to you, ‘her doctor,’ and so I called you.”

I smiled because I had heard her call me that before. I’m not a “real” doctor, a physician, that is. But I was “her doctor,” at that moment, standing at her bedside, offering the only remedy I could: prayer.

As I prayed aloud, she calmed down. Then she closed her eyes and grew very still. I watched to make sure she was breathing. And suddenly she opened her eyes wide, like she was surprised she was still there, and then she looked to the left and right without moving her head.

And the light in her eyes and the glow of her smile was angelic. Then, this one who moments ago couldn’t utter a single word, began singing, “Amazing Grace.” At first I was startled but didn’t hesitate to join her. And the two of us, both flat and off-key, sounding like two tone-deaf crooners, sang through not one but two stanzas of John Newton’s 1779 hymn.

I imagined the nurses glancing at each other with raised eyebrows: “What’s that preacher doing in there?”

But I pressed on, coaxing her to sing more: “Let’s sing another. How about Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so?”  Smiling, she joined me, and on we went as I continued holding her hand.

“Amazing Grace,” and “Jesus Loves Me,” must be encoded in her long-term memory. When the words of the present were locked inside her, the words of the old hymns flowed freely.

A few months ago, National Public Radio did a segment, “Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Victims Sing Again.” The story focused on a 16 year old girl who was the victim of a devastating stroke at age 11. Through “melodic intonation therapy,” or singing therapy, her speech had returned, and she was back in school. “I’m singing in my head and talking out loud without singing. I do it, like, really quick,” she said.

The therapy helps train the undamaged right side of the brain, which controls singing, to speak. It’s the damaged left side of the brain which controls speaking. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has utilized a form of singing therapy to help her speak again. In the case of the 16 year old stroke victim, the nerve fibers on the right side, the singing center of her brain, had actually grown after only four months of singing therapy. Although she still struggles to find the words, she is far ahead of where she was after a full year of conventional therapy.

"Basically, the hardware of the system really changed to support this increased vocal output," says Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, who heads the study on melodic intonation therapy at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts.

Dr.Schlaug cites patients in their 80s who have shown brain adaptations after the therapy. It just takes longer for them, just as it does to learn a foreign language the older one is. And he has also seen good results with autistic children and people with Parkinson’s disease who have difficulty speaking.

“If you can sing it, you’ll eventually say it,” I encouraged my friend in ICU.

She smiled.

I assured her: “We’ve had a good worship service: We’ve prayed, and we’ve sung hymns, and we were preaching when we were singing. God has to be pleased with you. So get some rest.”

And she did.

And in due time, she may be able to speak again, by God’s amazing grace.

One missing child still too many

I know how easy it is for a child to be abducted. That’s because when I was a child, I invited a stranger into my home.

It was 1963, I was in second grade, and Mom was at PTA meeting. I had been allowed to come home and stay by myself rather than wait at school until the meeting was over.

That’s when the stranger rang the doorbell.

I shouldn’t have opened the door, but I did, anyway. I shouldn’t have answered his question about where my parents were, telling him I was home alone, but I did, anyway.  And I shouldn’t have invited him in when he flipped a shiny silver dollar in the air, promising me it would be mine if I would let him in and give him something to eat. I shouldn’t have.

But I did, anyway.

And in an instant, I, a child, was alone in my house with a complete stranger.

I suppose there are as many ways to abduct a child as there are children to be abducted. In the US about 800,000 children are reported at least temporarily missing every year, although only about 115 become victims of what is viewed as stranger abductions.

Being vigilant about the potential for child abductions is now woven into our social fabric: We alert our children to “stranger danger;” we know Amber Alert; we try to teach our children how to respond to a potentially dangerous situation; we have a communal fear of a child being taken: We no longer raise our children in an age of innocence.

Much of our safeguard against child abductions is a result of the ones who didn’t make it back home. Etan Patz never returned after he was allowed for the first time to walk by himself to the school bus in the quiet, supposedly safe SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan 33 years ago. His became one of the first cases to utilize technology and media to try and find a missing child. Not only were flyers distributed on telephone poles throughout New York City, but Etan’s face was on every milk carton in America.

Community awareness and technological advances have been successful. Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has noted, "More than 99 percent of children reported missing in America in recent years have come home alive." 

Technology has created other possibilities as well. Steve Carter, a 35 year old software salesman, found himself on a missing children’s website. Last year, Steve, a resident of Philadelphia, was watching CNN’S coverage of Carlina White, the Atlanta woman who discovered she had been kidnapped from a Harlem hospital in 1987 by a women posing as a nurse. A website for missing children helped clue Carlina into her missing past.

That story made Steve even more curious about his own biological family, so on a hunch, he clicked on missingkids.com. He found an age-progression image of himself as an infant. With the exception of the haircut, the resemblance was remarkable. His biological mom had apparently given him to a Honolulu orphanage, changing Steve’s name. Now, he has been reunited with his biological father.

Having eaten the roast beef sandwich I had prepared from Sunday’s lunch, the stranger in my house paused as if he were a connoisseur of fine desserts, liking his lips, anticipating an after dinner treat.

I gazed at the floor.

I can still feel his eerie stare like the hot breath on the neck of an animal being pursued by a predator.

Then, as if he sensed my apprehension, he suddenly became a salesman and pulling out a picture album, he opened it and began showing portraits of children, picture after picture of boys and girls. They looked like pictures of children suitable for a church pictorial directory.

But they weren’t.

“Would you like to go with me and have your picture made?” he asked. Having my picture made didn’t sound the least bit appealing and besides, I told the stranger, my mom would be home any minute, and he could ask her.

“You don’t have to ask her,” the stranger whispered, and in the next breath, he asked to use the phone.

He made a call to the Weston Hotel, which I later learned carried the seediest of reputations in our town.

I don’t recall the details of his short conversation, but he abruptly hung up the phone with declaration and announced, “Sorry, kid, I’ve got to go.”

And he hustled out the door, without a mention of the silver dollar.

Later that afternoon, Mom was interrogating my older brother, Mark, about the mysterious disappearance of the roast beef. That’s when I told Mom, matter of factly, what had transpired while she was at PTA.

At once there was a flurry of activity. Dad was suddenly home, the police arrived, I was questioned, and later, late in the night, taken to the police station and asked to pick out the suspect in a line-up.

The stranger wasn’t among them.

Who told him to leave my house? And why didn’t he take me? Did he move on to abduct other children? And who were those children in the photo album?

The possibilities are as frightening as the ones that could have happened to me.

It’s comforting to be a part of the many who were never abducted or among the 99% who were but returned safely home.

It’s the 1% that haunts me. For I was most surely almost among them.

Jesus told about leaving the 99 and searching for the lost one: “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others on the hills and go out to search for the one that is lost?” (Matthew 18:12).

Why does he go? Because the Father cares.

 And knows: “I have called you by name; you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1).

Even when their names are changed and their background erased, the Father knows who the missing children are and to whom they belong.

And even when their life is lost, he has found them.