The Only Axe Murderer I Ever Knew

Somewhere down in the depths of this blog is an essay about people I have known.  One of those people is the only axe murderer that I ever knew.

I tried to Google the events and find his name, but I couldn’t.  Probably it is just as well.  He may now be an orthodontist in Minneapolis or something.  I might get sued if I got the details wrong.  Seems strange that I would have to consider legal action by an axe murderer while posting in my blog!  What a nation of lawyers we live in.

I was on the swimming team for four years at Carnegie-Mellon University, beginning in 1968.  During the first or second year, I recall that there was a quiet guy that had the locker next to mine.  It was where we changed into our Speedos (caution, do not allow a mental image to form of me in a Speedo, it may cause permanent psychological scarring)

They guy was a senior and I don’t recall him being remarkable in any way.  His hair was neat and short in an era where I got kicked off the team for having a mustache (story for another time).  He was an engineering student.

After he had graduated, his name appeared in a big story on the front page of the Pittsburgh newspaper.  He had been dating a girl and had gotten engaged to her.  She decided to end the engagement.  He got drunk one night and climbed up to the second floor of her house where she was asleep in her room.  He chopped her to death with a weed cutter (wood handle, big steel blade, you get the idea;  I always say “axe murderer” because it has entered into the lexicon in a way that “weed cutter murderer” never will.)
If I remember correctly, her parents were asleep in another room when he killed her.  He hurt his back when he jumped off the roof of the front porch to escape, and was quickly apprehended.  

The thing that has made the biggest impression on me is how ordinary he was.  Absolutely nothing clued me into the idea that this guy was dangerous.  On the contrary, he seemed meek compared to a lot of the jocks I had to deal with.

That was almost forty years ago.  In a more recent decade, many thousands of the citizens of Rwanda and Burundi decided that they really didn’t like some of their neighbors. In fact they killed 800,000 of those neighbors in a few short months.  Mostly they hacked them to death with machetes.  The scale and suddenness of the genocide is astounding.  But for it to happen at all, those thousands of people all had to cross the same line that the fellow in my college had to cross.  They didn’t have to be ignorant, savage, or dedicated to a particularly violent ideology.  I believe most of them referred to themselves as Christians.  It almost seems that their collective crime is more understandable than that of my former swim team associate.  He acted alone with only alcohol and the sting of rejection to break down the wall of civility that generally stops us from killing each other.
The folks in Africa had a long history of being angry with their neighbors and were whipped into a frenzy by politically motivated leaders.  Most of them must have been caught up in a sort of mass hysteria.

I find it very important to remember that the only axe murderer I ever knew was very ordinary.  Otherwise I start to think that all those people that commit atrocities are somehow in a different category than you and I.  All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Most of us have committed murder in our thoughts.  Many of us have come much closer to seriously physically harming someone that we would care to admit.  Probably most of us have caused more spiritual and psychological damage to our fellow humans than we can possibly imagine.

It is not a matter of “there but for the grace of God”.   We are already there. I thank God for his mercy and grace.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=LSsNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vWwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6105,782533&dq=carnegie+mellon+engineer+murder  

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=3rd&navby=case&no=992059p

http://www.arsint.com/2007/j_min_8.html

follow up article bottom of page dated 2007

A Mere Blimp On the Horizon

I was probably about 11 years old.  My dad told mom and us to get in the car and to not ask any questions.  We lived north of New Orleans in Metairie, and we drove for an hour or so south and east to a spot I had seldom seen.  We drove right out into a large open field.  At some point we spotted the Goodyear blimp.  It loomed huge as we drove near it.  I remember wondering why Dad was so secretive about us going to see the blimp.  We had seen it before flying lazily along above a vast Mardi gras crowd.  It was certainly a special treat to see it up close.  But why all the secrecy?

My two brothers and I sat in the car with my Mom while Dad got out and walked up to some guy and chatted with him.  After a moment he walked back and said, o.k. let’s go.
We piled out of the car and walked toward the blimp as several guys struggled to hold it in place with ropes that trailed down toward the ground.  Underneath the blimp was a little passenger compartment that seemed about the size of a VW bus.  Steps were tossed down and we climbed in!  For reasons I could not fathom, my mom chose to stay behind at the car.  Soon I saw the guys holding the ropes letting us ease up higher off the ground.

They can only do this if there is very little wind, explained my Dad.  So he didn’t want to get our hopes up and then find out that we were canceled out due to weather.  He had worked for Goodyear for a long time.  This was a little perk that a few employees got to enjoy when the blimp was in town and not busy flying over a parade or a football game.

The blimp rose up rather slowly. I was seated just behind the pilot who seemed as if he were driving the VW bus.  A low rumble turned into a loud roar as the propeller engines that pushed the blimp were throttled up to push us lazily along.  It was the first time I had flown. It is the only time I have flown in a lighter than air vehicle.  My most vivid memory is one of seeing kids playing on a swing set down below us.  We were high enough that they were tiny and seemed to be rushing forward and backwards beneath the pole of the swing set.  For however long the flight lasted, we were absolutely transfixed by the sights rolling slowly along below us.  I have flown on many airplanes of various sizes in the decades since.  I have never experienced anything quite the same.

Tonight I have taken some time to remember that flight. It was so absolutely unexpected.  To this day, when I tell the story, I have never met anyone who said, “Oh yeah, I did that too when I was a kid.”  As I consider the years since, I realize that many other equally unexpected things have happened.  Some of those things have been wonderful.  Some have been terrible.  Many, many things that I could never have predicted!

Why then do I fail to understand that the next minute may hold a surprise still greater than all those so far?  Why do I feel that I am plodding along a well defined path when every step I take is new territory, time never lived before.  The number of possible outcomes for each moment is vast beyond knowing.  I am hurling through space at thousands of miles per hour.  It is impossible that I will ever be mired within the small scope of my imagination.  I praise God for the adventures ahead.

Conspiracy

con·spire Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French conspirer, from Latin conspirare to be in harmony, conspire, from com- + spirare to breathetransitive senses : PLOT, CONTRIVE
PLOT, INTRIGUE, MACHINATION, CONSPIRACY, CABAL mean a plan secretly devised to accomplish an evil or treacherous end.

Let me begin by assuring my reader that I do believe that many conspiracies have been devised throughout history.  However, what strikes me as very odd is how willing we are to believe that complex, decades or even centuries long conspiracies account for much of the evil we see in this world.  The latest conspiracy to gain such credence forms the basic premise of the DaVinci Code.  The idea that relatively small groups of power hungry men have deceived all of Christendom for more than 16 centuries is ludicrous.

The government of the Soviet Union did its best to suppress religious belief altogether.  But a decades long effort seems to have yielded little more than a pent up desire on the part of the former Soviet citizens to know more about things spiritual.  Once the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a sort of stampede by the citizens toward embracing various religions.  One suspects that a great deal had been going on all along and was simply not publicized.

It is my experience in a large multinational corporation that human leaders are completely incapable of concocting and sustaining the sorts of elaborate plans that a world shaking conspiracy would require.  The best corporate leaders can generally hope for is to set a direction and hope that employees stumble a bit more in that direction than they formerly did.  The idea of a precisely executed ballet involving tens of thousands of people is laughable.

Stories like the DaVinci code suppose that hundreds or thousands of people will remain faithful to a conspiracy for hundreds and hundreds of years.  That is exactly the kind of unity and commitment that God asked of the Jews in the Old Testament.  It is a miracle of God that they managed to maintain a written history over a two thousand year period.  And that very history shows that time and time again they failed to stay on course.  They could not maintain discipline for even a few decades before falling into all sorts of degradation and foolishness.  Despite miraculous interventions by God, they failed repeatedly.

We are flawed. We are greedy and power hungry. We plot, conspire, and collude.  The very flaws that cause us to take such actions, also doom those actions to failure.

We have met the enemy, said Pogo, and he is us.  

Cup of Cold Water

Matthew 10:42 (New International Version)
42And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward."
I have been haunted by this verse for weeks.  I had to check past posts to make sure I hadn’t already written about it.  I stumbled last week as I considered the purpose and impact of my life.  I simply could not imagine that the sorts of things I do each day could matter very much to God or the people around me.  Correction:  I could not imagine that the good things I do matter very much.  My sins have clearly contributed to the debased state of this world and the pain that we all share.  But my acts of kindness, the scope of my love, the purity of my intentions all seemed insignificant.

But the phrase “if anyone gives even a cup of cold water” restores my hope.   Especially since Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward”.  

By the grace of God, I am able to do some few things that are good.   My motives are mixed, but at least they are mixed and not purely selfish.  I pray that God will give me the opportunity and the will to hand out a few more cups of cold water.

Life is hard, then we die

Suppose you ask a friend to describe their life. They reply, “I am hard pressed! I feel like I am being crushed and it perplexes me. I can honestly say I have been struck down. I feel like I carry around death, wherever I go.

I suspect that the response of many of us would be to encourage the person. We might remind them that God loves them. Perhaps we would pray for them, on the spot. I also suspect that some part of us might wonder at their negativity. Surely they realize that the Christian life is full of blessings and victory. Is their faith so small that they are blind to that?

After the best encouragement and prayer we have to offer, imagine the person said, “Well I’m just thankful I’m not completely crushed! I am not in total despair. Many people persecute me, but God has not abandoned me. And I’m still here. Life hasn’t destroyed me. In fact, people can see what Jesus is like when they seem me going through this stuff.”

It is likely that by now you know I am setting trap for you with the scenario above. In second Corinthians chapter four, the apostle Paul lays out a description of the Christian life that closely corresponds with what our imaginary friend has said. I have inserted the text below:

2 Corinthians 4:7-10 (New International Version)
7But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.

Life really is hard. And it is not hard because we lack faith or fail to pray. It is hard because there is sin in this world. Our own sin. Other people’s sin. Present, past, future sin. And we are too weak to overthrow the reign of sin, even in ourselves. How much less can we conquer sin for the whole world.
What we can do is trust in God with all our hearts. He will guide us. He will heal us. We are only getting in the way when we pretend that everything is fine, just fine. We are particularly obstinate when we will not confess that we have failed. In Jesus’ parable (Luke 18: 9 – 14), the tax collector cries out “God, have mercy on me, a sinner”. He is the one who is justified before God. Not the Pharisee who is confident that he is living the victorious Jewish life.
This life is hard. It is full of blessings and also full of pain. We are here for a reason, but we long to go home.

Life is hard, then we die.

Close to Heaven, Close to Hell

An acquaintance recently quoted the following to me:

For those who trust in Christ as their savior, this world is as close to hell as they will ever experience.
For those who don't, this world is as close to heaven as they will ever experience.

I get that it is not scripture and is subject to all sorts of misinterpretations (as is scripture, come to think of it).
However, it caused me to think more deeply about heaven and hell for a few days.

Heaven is being fully in the presence of God and enjoying having all the encumbrances of this sin cursed world and our fallen nature removed.

Hell is being fully removed from the presence of God. No hope of further nudges from the Holy Spirit. No chance to express a change of heart. I imagine it as an endless night in a pitch black room on an uncomfortable bed. Desperately trying to sleep, but instead tossing and turning with my mind seething with resentments, anxieties, hostilities, all the works of the sinful nature.

It is a blessing to know that my readers still have the opportunity to seek God and be assured of finding him.

That is good news, indeed!

It is far more difficult to love a man than it is to love mankind.

How bad does a person have to be before I decide that even God could not love them?

In your mind, line up Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, and throw in some anonymous child molesters, rapists, serial killers, and parents who torture their own children. Don’t forget the woman who sold her baby for her next hit of crack. And let's include the two guys who abducted and raped a teen girl, then chopped off her hands with an axe and left her to die. Imagine they have never expressed a single regret for what they have done. In some cases, the crimes that horrify us may be their proudest achievements.

As they step up to be judged, it seems simple to most of us: a bullet, a deadly syringe or prison for life are clearly merited. Some may struggle a bit more with what punishment is appropriate. Sadly, such judgments must be made in this world. We agree on certain activities as being criminal behavior. And we agree that it is appropriate to punish criminals, although we may disagree on what that punishment should be.

Here is what hits me so hard that I feel as though I may vomit: God has made it clear that he wants me to love the sorts of people I have described. I am commanded by God to love my enemies, my neighbors, and those who persecute me. I am called to become more like Christ. I can despise the sin, but I am to love the sinner.

There is part of me that desperately wants to have an exception clause for people that have done things as heinous as the people I asked you to mentally line up. I am aware of that same part of me wanting to make exceptions for people who have hurt me more personally. Their crimes don’t have to be nearly as horrific as those that the line up committed. They need not be crimes at all. It can be enough if I feel I have been wronged. It can be enough that they wound the very pride that I have asked God to free me of.

There have been times when I have felt that God asks too much when he asks me to love someone. There have also been times when I felt it was impossible that God would still love me.

Those are lies. God does not ask too much of me. I ask too little of him. I must ask him, in faith, for the ability to love others. And God will always love me. God is love. God is infinite. How foolish to think that there is anything I could do that would have the power to negate his very essence.

I thank God for who he is. I thank God for calling me to be more like him. I thank God for loving me.

Euangelion

Words seem destined to take on meanings that distort what the original author meant.  The word I have been thinking about lately is “gospel”.  English has changed enough over the centuries that the old English phrase “god spel” which meant “good news” was turned into a single word:  gospel.  The original word in the Greek text of the New Testament is written euangelion in the Latin alphabet. Euangelion is the root of the words evangelize and evangelical.  The gospel is the good news about Jesus. Telling others the good news is to evangelize.  One who believes and shares the good news may be termed an evangelical.

Somehow, before I was a Christian, “gospel” didn’t mean good news to me at all. It meant true, as in “you can take that as gospel” when one wished to be emphatic about an assertion.  Occasionally, I might hear someone argue in favor of the bible and assert “it’s the gospel”, seeming to mean that it is unequivocally true.   A lot of the quotes I heard from the Bible seemed to say that we were bad enough that God would send us to hell for some pretty gruesome, eternal punishment.  The only way out was to “repent” which I interpreted as “stop doing bad stuff”.  I can’t remember a day in my life where I wasn’t pretty aware that I was thinking and sometimes doing some pretty bad stuff.  I suppose when I was 3 or 4 years old I may have not been aware.  But I don’t remember those years at all. Some of the “bad” stuff seemed pretty nice at the time and I didn’t want to quit.  Other bad stuff seemed genuinely bad, but I didn’t seem to be able to stop it, no matter how hard I tried.  Of course, I tried my best to rationalize that maybe it wasn’t really all that bad.  I would always have been quick to say “nobody is perfect”, but it was more of a defense of my own frailties than it was a recognition of the sinfulness of all people.  It was pretty much the same as saying “everybody does it”.

So the gospel seemed like pretty bad news.  God was going to eternally punish me for my sins.  Some of the sins didn’t seem to be sins; in fact they were some of my favorite things to think or do.  Others were “imperfections” that every human on the face of the earth seemed to share to one degree or another.   When people declared that the Gospel was true, it seemed to me that they were declaring that I was indeed doomed to an eternity of hideous pain.

I don’t think I ever felt certain that God did not exist.  I said I was an agnostic.  I was, however, very hopeful that God did not exist and that the “gospel” was indeed false.

For many years I struggled with the feeling that “witnessing” or “sharing the gospel” meant telling other people that they are sinners and that they will suffer eternal pain unless they get their thinking and actions right.  Even after I put less emphasis on the actions and more on proper thinking, it still felt pretty brutal to let someone know that despite the fact that they shared that screwed up thinking with every human on earth, they needed to change or burn in hell.

Bit by bit, I see things differently now.  I see the evidence of God’s grace in my own life and in the life of others.  Grace may be defined as “unmerited favor”.  It can’t be earned, that would make it “merited favor”.  More and more I understand this as very good news!  Now “witnessing” or “sharing the gospel” become more and more the actions of telling or showing people that I know we are all imperfect and the God is too good to tolerate that, but there is still some extremely good news that I have personally experienced.  I have come to have faith that God loves me so much that he planned a means for setting me free from what would otherwise be the consequences of my failings.

I used the term “bit by bit” because, just when I think I have a pretty solid grip on how good the news really is, I then learn a bit more about it and about God’s love for me.  And every time something painful or difficult happens in my life, I am a bit less likely to fall back to the idea that I am reaping the painful penalties for my sins.  Instead I see the pain or difficulty leading me to cling more tightly to God.  I need his love.  I need his help.  I am unashamed of the good news, because it really is good.  The gospel is so good that I hope to spend the rest of my life experiencing and understanding the breadth and depth of God’s grace, mercy, and love.

I cry out, “May God have mercy on me, a sinner”.  What great news it is that he does forgive me and cleanse me of those sins.  Once I have passed through life on this earth, I will be made completely new!  I will live forever in his presence!  Meanwhile, each day I can choose to serve God’s purpose and plan for me.

It is very good news indeed!

Earth Day

Earth Day is coming up.  I suddenly realized that I had attended the very first earth day rally (in Pittsburgh) in 1970.  There had been a modest attempt to get something going in 1969, but the big official day was first held in April of 1970.  A U.S. Senator promoted it, lots of students and environmental types met in lots of cities.  Apparently it has been celebrated every year since, although I confess I often don’t notice it at all.

I find that getting older can give me a certain amount of perspective if I take the time to reflect upon what I have seen in my life.  So although I refuse to condone some of the fruit cake ideas that have been promoted under the banner of “environmentalism”, I certainly do want to confirm that it has been extremely important for us to clean up our act.

So here are a few facts from my childhood and teen years that would tend to indicate that things had gotten pretty bad before people woke up to the need to do better:

-  Whooping cranes and brown pelicans were near extinction when I was a kid.
-   I am told that sea otters were no longer seen off the west coast of the continental U.S.
-   Lake Erie (near my home in Ohio) was declared biologically dead.  It was so polluted that literally nothing could live in it except perhaps a few microorganisms that we would prefer to be free of.
-  The Cuyahoga River, which flowed near my Ohio home and on into Lake Erie, actually caught fire as memorialized in the Randy Newman song “Burn On Big River”.  It took many days to put the fire out.  There was so much flammable toxic sludge on top of the river that pumping water from the river onto the flames could not extinguish it.  As I recall, at least one bridge in Cleveland burned up as a result of the river fire.
-  Alligators were nearly extinct in the swamps in Louisiana where I spend most of my childhood.
- Giant Condors were nearly extinct (I am not sure if they ever recovered).
- All the buildings on the Carnegie-Mellon U. campus (and elsewhere in Pittsburgh) were literally black with soot.  At night I could see light from the blast furnaces in the valley below and the air smelled weird and left a funky metallic taste in my mouth.

These items are not the result of exhaustive research.  In fact, they are simple everyday items I remember from my relatively uniformed childhood.

- Lake Erie is now a sport fishery.
- Some of the nearly extinct species rebounded.
- Alligators are now common enough to be a pest in the southern U.S.
- The air in Pittsburgh is relatively clean and most of the older buildings have been sandblasted back to their original stone or cement color.

So thirty years of pollution controls, superfund clean ups, automobile exhaust regulations, and much more have made a very positive difference.  As we are willing to spend a bit of money on it, I am sure we can do much more.  Yes, I want to make it a priority to feed hungry people and to spread the gospel.  I would just like to make it a bit less of a priority to have a lot of the kind of crap that people like me buy and consume.  I am positively swimming in a sea of possessions and I keep buying more.  Paying for pollution clean up is a weird sort of thing.  You don’t get cool catalogues which trick you into parting with your money to pay for nuclear waste disposal or sulfur dioxide scrubbers.  You don’t see T.V. ads with scantily clad women draped all over some guy who just bought a lower emissions car.  Pollution clean up is mostly done with taxes and regulations which most companies and many individuals find onerous, at least at first.  And since we are a democracy, the whole regulations and taxes thing is a very, very messy, inefficient process.   However, judging by the environmental status of African dictatorships or former Soviet block countries, democracy and bridled capitalism may be the best government and economic system we have to work with.

Take heart.  Even on this sin cursed earth, prior to Jesus’ return, progress can be and has been made.  Pray that each one of us will become just a bit wiser about how to spend our time and money.

Blogger’s Block

Blogger’s Block

I think I have the blog version of writer’s block. Every time I try to steer my brain towards something worth writing about, it just shuts down. This is coupled with a general down feeling and a need for a lot of rest. I had a week with three doctor’s appointments. It turns out that even if you take decent care of yourself, you still fall apart over time. Of course, when I was younger, I did not take decent care of myself. But for the past 20 plus years I have been practically squeaky clean.

O.K. It is time to turn my thoughts elsewhere. I closed my eyes and thought back to when I was a little kid (about a half a century ago, really). I had recurrent dreams where I suddenly discovered that by jumping just right I could practically fly. I could take one long floating jump for 25 or 50 feet or more. In the dream I discovered that if I moved just right I could keep floating along. At least once, while I was awake, I remembered the dream so vividly that I became convinced that if I would move just right when I jumped, I would float across the yard. I wasn’t really frustrated when I couldn’t. I was just surprised. It had seemed so real in the dream.

I wonder if there was any relationship to something I used to do a lot when I was a little kid. I would lie in bed with my eyes closed and imagine that the bed was lifting up off the floor. I could rotate it. I could even lift up through the ceiling and hover above our block. I could fly anywhere I wanted. Of course my eyes were closed, so I couldn’t see anything happening. But I could feel the change in my position. I could feel the drop below my bed floating high in the air. I tried this again not so long ago. It still works.