If I Ever Feel Better

My prediction came true yesterday morning, when my boss informed me that I have been made redundant after only five months with the company.  I took it in good humour because, as I informed HR, “I can’t justify my position either”.  The package is particularly generous and I have a few other employers interested, so there’s no fear that I will be out on the streets.  My only regret will be saying goodbye to my truly delightful co-workers after such a short time.

Right now, the easiest option would be to take the well-paid, mine-if-I-just-ask-for-it job back in Canberra - but I can’t do that.  A few months in Sydney has made me realise how much happier I am here right now than I was back there.  How much of that is geographic and how much is just internal, I don’t know - but there’s no point risking it when there are jobs up here to be had.

You really can’t go back.

Tonsils are inflamed AGAIN.  For a moment I’m wishing they had been taken out when I was a kid.

I’ve finished the Hillsong book, for those of you with an interest in Australian prosperity-teaching megachurches - review coming out on Popmatters shortly and probably a more personal reflection on this here blog.

Stay tuned!

This week is going to be a potentially important one for me, career-wise.  My company is looking to make redundancies and I don’t know whethere I will be affected or not.

My reaction for the most part has been to ignore it or to make jokes about it.  The only problem is that the jokes will become a lot less funny when people actually start to be laid off.  I’m curiously certain that I will be one them but even if that is the case, it won’t just be me and I’m not sure people will like my flippancy.

I should probably hold off on the “Happy Redundancy Day” cards.

It’s been a while since I’ve thought about Joel Osteen, the megasuccessful mega-church pastor who just wants you to be living “your best life now”.  But apparently 60 Minutes has done a story on him and the Internet Monk is getting all hot under the collar about him all over again.

The big deal, as far as people like the Monk are concerned, is that Joel Osteen doesn’t really talk about Jesus a whole lot and doesn’t use the Bible a lot and really, when it all boils down, is just a secular motivational speaker.  Which is entirely true.  I saw his latest book in Target today, so I’m guessing there’s nothing too divisively Christian contained within.

I personally see the guy as being a bit of a joke, but then I’m at a safe distance so I see the influence of prosperity teachers closer as a lot more insidious.  In the end, though, I see so many corruptions and distortions of what Jesus taught everywhere in the church, that I’m not really going to say Joel Osteen is the problem.  He’s just a symptom of something bigger.

There’s a kind of soft prosperity teaching (or Christian Voodoo, as I call it) everywhere in modern Christianity that says that turning to Jesus is going to make your life better in the here and now.  I’ve had it up to here with that kind of attitude and I’m trying to work things out in my own head so I can try and address it effectively.

A good start is Michael Horton’s essay “Doesn’t God Want Us To Be Happy?”

Now someone give Dr Phil a church - he deserves it as much as Joel.

Isn’t it strange that in a sizeable percentage of your dreams you find yourself naked in public and yet in real life that so rarely happens?

I’m talking at church tonight - the first time since my move and in my new church home.  I’m still so fresh and new there that I’m not quite so sure of myself as I was back in Canberra.  Maybe it’s that uncertainty about whether people will warm to me and my jokes and my particular take on things.

I don’t plan on an any major heresy or any gratuitous swearing (unlike in previous instances) but there’s still a matter of audience receptiveness and openness.  I guess I’ll just have to judge that as I go.

Only real problem is that I’m still partially knocked-out with tonsilitis, the reason why this blog has been quiet this week.  There’s little to report when you’re lying in bed reading.

Last night, I tagged along to my first ever basketball game.  It was a pretty good game and the result was in doubt until the last minute.  I’d forgotten that my friend had said that one of the players was a Christian and would be talking about it after the game.

Anyway, I won’t go too much into that part of things, because my views on “short-jargon-filled-testimonies-followed-by-asking-people-to-accept-Jesus” are pretty well known.   Today, I have a bigger question to ask - why does our “sales pitch” focus so much on Jesus making everything all right for us?  One of the speakers last night was talking about how travelling the world, she’d always had a place to sleep and enough money to get by and she attributed this to Jesus.  And my brain kicked in with “But I know agnostic backpackers who could say the same thing”.

I’ve heard people talk about praying for car spots and praying for healing and any number of things and I’ve heard all the inspiring Christian anecdotes about last-minute interventions.  But I’ve also seen studies that track the effectiveness on prayer in cancer patients (nothing shows up) and I’ve also pondered whether Christians as a rule have better “luck” than others.  My instinct is that we don’t.

If I was talking to most people at church about this, I suspect they’d be horrified.  What am I saying here?  That God doesn’t care about us?  That being a Christian makes no difference?  That God never heals anyone or provides for anyone?

I’m not going to claim the last one, although I do think that miraculous intervention is far rarer in this day and age than it was in the past.  And I’m going to go out on a limb and claim that the main difference between the religious and the non-religious is that the former will attribute everything good that happens to God and find ways to dismiss all the bad.  The latter just takes things as they come.

I also believe that God caring about us is about more than making our life easy - because he never promised that it would be.  So we’re selling him short if we focus on the simple things that can be so easily dismissed as good luck or superstition.  There are so many other things to tell people about Jesus that won’t set them up for disappointment the first time bad fortune comes their way.  Like who he was as a person, what he taught, what he did for us, how he’s got a plan for the whole world (rather than just your bank balance) and how we can be part of it.

That’s all.

The blasts from the past on Facebook keep coming - more and more people are turning up, curious as to what the last decade has brought.  Oddly enough, two old school friends have made allusions to “my smiley face”.  It’s got me thinking - is that how people saw me?  Is that what I was like?

School was an interesting (read “often unpleasant”) time for me, although my memories from the last few years were generally positive.  I just can’t quite connect the me of 2007 with the me of 1997.  I know there are similarities, but the subsequent changes wrought by moving out of home aged 17, going to uni, working etc have been substantial.

At least it’s nice to think that others look back on those days and see a smiling face.

I have to admit, looking the way I do, staying in East St Kilda over the weekend was an interesting choice.

It seems that I am mistaken for Jewish with increasing frequency these days.  So naturally, I pick a hotel that turns out to be right next to a synagogue, in the heart of Melbourne’s Jewish community.  No possibility for misunderstandings there.

Walking down the street on Friday night, I could feel all the Hasidic guys in their suits and hats looking at me and thinking “Bad Jew, bad Jew”.    And catching a tram with my dearest (and most Jewish) friend through the heart of Jewtown, we ran into some of her old friends who were clearly trying to suss out whether I was one of them.

I need a t-shirt or something that says “Not Actually Jewish”.  Or “Goy Division”.