3 Things to Learn from Loosing Your Wallet

Well, I dropped the ball. I didn't take a picture of Dom and Amy when we had dinner together. Sorry. But they were awesome. We went to Panis and had a nice meal with a nice bottle of red wine and some great conversation. Dom just finished university and is starting with a law firm in a few months. These two awesome people are going to go on a long holiday soon.

Reflecting on the lost wallet saga, I can say that I have learned a few things about myself and life in general.

1. Some things just don't bother me.
2. Some things don't bother me until people start worrying about them for me.
3. Credit cards are for your wallet, cash is for your pocket. I accidentally lucked out on this one. I just happened to stuff all of my money into my pocket instead of my wallet in the guitar store just a few hours before ditching my wallet under a bench at a train station. Not that it would have mattered, Dom and Amy would have found it and all would have been well, mostly because they rock and are super awesome and because they are honest and would have returned my wallet with all contents undisturbed.

Another thing that I learned from this experience is that most people are good people.

Really.

It's true. I think...

I mean, Dom and Amy were perfectly random people. They could have been anybody. They were as perfectly honest as anyone I could have hoped for. They actually went through a fair bit of trouble to find me (they must have, because I still can't find this blog on Google) so that I could have my wallet back, which didn't have any money in it, so it wasn't really worth much. If I never got it back, it wouldn't have been a big deal. Not that I'm not unbelievable happy to have it back, but I'm more happy to have lost it and had this experience than to have found it again.

I don't really feel like I'm conveying what I mean to say very well. Dom and Amy are a perfectly random selection of human beings. They are extraordinary people, for sure, but are they really better than the average person?

Not to be a media-basher, but I think that my perception of people as individuals has been tainted by what I read about on www.cnn.com and www.drudgereport.com. I was reading a Bill O'Reilly column this morning about Hillary Clinton. He was asking why is it that people hate her so much? He also asked why people hate George Bush so much. I think it's because we are so dominated by our fears. We live, day after day, with this false perception that there are a whole load of people out there that just hate everyone.

Why?

What makes us think that most people are any different than we are? Maybe the thing is, we know how we are, and we don't trust ourselves.

The thing about that is we all love ourselves. Well, all of us that aren't suicidal love ourselves. We might not like ourselves, but we do love ourselves.

---break---

Some of you may be thinking at this point that I'm going to be making some revolutionist's claim that we should all start acting radically different like a bunch of crazy cult people. Life might be a little better if we did act different, but I want to know why we do what we do. You can't fix anything if you don't know why it isn't working. A lot of our "solutions" are remedies for the symptoms of the real problem.

---Resume---

So if we all love ourselves, and if we don't think that most people are worse than us, why aren't we more open? I think it's fear. Of what? Of putting ourselves out there and getting rejected. I tried something the other day, I said "hi" to like 30 or 40 people on the street, almost everyone of them completely ignored me. People don't even interact with one another anymore. I think it's because we're afraid of being rejected and you can't be rejected if you don't give anyone anything to reject.

I realized shortly ago that I have not posted virtually anything about the Africa Mercy or Mercy Ships, so I'm going to take a few lines to do just that.

Work on the subcontractor and ship yard side is going quite slow. We are making stead progress in the engine room (we had an engine test this past Saturday, I'll write about it more later). My other big responsibility, the container hold, is going forward for the first time in years (big cheer). We are going to have a company deliver weights and test the nylon slides at some point in the next couple of weeks (I'll write a post about that as well). Moral hasn't been so great among the crew the past few weeks. It's because of the rumor of bad news on the way. We got part one of the bad news talk last week at our community meeting. The jest of it was that Ken isn't going to be our executive director when we get to Africa. I'm not totally sure of the effect that will have on me or my work. But part two of the bad news saga is coming on Wednesday, and I suspect that the climax will be in that segment.

I came up with this new idea for posts. I'm going to start doing a study for myself on how Jesus interacts with other people and groups and start posting my findings. I'm excited to do this study because Christians are supposed to be "little Christs" so we should treat people like he did...so we should know how he treated people right?