I had five fantasy baseball teams registered with MLB.com this year. Last year, one of my teams, the Landisville Sluggers, finished second in their division and made it to the playoffs as the 4th seed before being eliminated in the first rounf by the ultimately champion. This year, one of my new teams, Steve's Stars made it to the playoffs and yesterday won the league title by defeating the Dominican Pride 209-185. I owe a whole lot to an excellent pitching staff - the Philadelphia Phillies and some great hitters, Troy Tulowiski of the Rockies and Martin Prado of the Braves before he went on the DL. I had a ball! (They tell me I probably won a certificate and T-shirt, the latter of which I will wear proudly.)
The landscape is now beginning to be dotted and in some places inundated with election signs. The 2010 election is barely a month away. I confess, I do not like the election season. The yard pollution of all these unsightly signs destroys the incredible beauty of the fall season. Then there are the political attack ads which become more vicious and more prolific each year. And the auto-dialed political calls and the spam emails just complicate, clutter, and clang in my life. I tend to be an informed voter, who does his own research on the issues and the politicians. I rarely use biased sources if I can help it, These tools of modern day elections would simply drive me away from the polls if I didn't consider voting an essential responsibility of a citizen of a free nation. But could we some how weed out the nonsense and the mind-numbing communications that rob us of a quiet moment or a peaceful evening?
One of my favorite authors in CS Lewis. Many people know him today because of his Narnia books. I am more drawn by his epic works like The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. In his honor I'd like to share several quotes from this brilliant man:
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable." - The Four Loves
"The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
"God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing."
"Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
And this quote, perhaps my my most favorite of all:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." - Mere Christianity
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