"HEE LEEFTS HEVY TINGS" said of The Great Rambozo from "The Time Bandits"

I suppose I could skip this Tuesday since I am tired and I might say something I might regret later. So here goes:

First, I was musing this morning about how so many things in my life come in clusters of three. Not in my marriage thank God but lots of other things. It does eliminate the problems involved in dualisms and of course monotherapy! We choose to segment pregnancies into three phases, first trimester, second trimester, and the third. During the first phase a DNA print is chosen and put up on the wall of the uterus. Very nice and everything matches too! At least at first. During the second trimester we find the child fully formed so there are not likely to be any major birth defects coming up in the second trimester. Said occupante just gets bigger and stronger and more and more neurons find more and more synapses and thus "the net" is formed. In the third trimester there is more of the same however things change in both the mother and child as both in parallel prepare for graduation time, which then is usually full of celebration and hoopla. The mysterious thing is that one never knows when to plan the graduation. I will for the moment ignore the mania for C-sections which are certainly not necessary 40 to over 50% of the time! There are megatons of things one could say about this but frankly I am too tired and I have to save up energy for the next paragraph.

In August I will enter my third trimester of life, having duly celebrated at least personally the passage of 2009. I might add that our son Stephen will be entering into his second trimester -- he will be 31 in less than a month and of course now he can no longer be trusted, according to us hippies. In the third trimester one does not have to worry about being trusted, but one can trust that we will be dully ignored! One does wonder about one's EDC (expected date of confinement, left over from the days when postpartum women were expected to stay in bed for a month, many of them dying of blood clots and a host of other things. Ah, Science. But now we are ever so much better than those old fools, yes?)

Obviously I am not going to be able to carry this analogy very far nor do I intend to. But my form and my format were certainly determined in my first 30 years. I was 30 years old when I first started to practice medicine. It has been my hope not to grow bigger, although most of us manage to do so. Whether I've grown stronger or wiser I will have to leave to the splendid judgment of others. But as I have said in previous posts, in the first 30 years I was pretty judgmental but did so as a Sadducee. The next 30 years I continued to be equally judgmental, this time as a religious Pharisee. So by this time I have had lots and lots of practice being partial. But I hardly think my inner child should be forging a choice between these two"alternative lifestyles".

This is the beauty of their being a third phase and a third way which, by grace, exists to eliminate the wars of resentment that battle within me. It will probably take me another 30 years to get a running start at that. And this time I intend to avoid phases I and II, not in my own strength of course which has failed me for 60 years or so; yes, it is time to grow up and grow out and prepare for graduation again.(School never ended for me.) As my wife puts it, the goal may be to become," unoffensive and unoffendable."

Of course I realize to even mention such a thing or such a goal is almost universally offensive in itself. Who do I think I am? Well that remains to be seen but I can guarantee one thing and that is, come gradation time I will never be elected," Mr. Personality," no matter how small the class! All I can really say is that it is a Scriptural principle and let it go at that.

But this brings me to a possible correlation re: "Sin is universal." Now I suppose that sounds pretty judgmental but I think it is more logical, looking at it from the third point/Person of view. I would challenge anyone to say that they can't find something wrong with the next guy.

Does anyone remember the old song, "The John Birch Society"? Joyce, you may have heard it at our house-- I think it was by the Kingston Trio or The Limelighters. In one verse it portrays two members, one of them singing, "There's only thee and me you see and I'm not sure about thee!!! I have yet to meet someone who never complains about someone else and suspends the thoughts that many if not most people continue doing something "wrong". If there is no such thing as sin, why do so many materialists attribute it to their fellow materialists, not to mention to most of the rest of the human race? "Right and wrong," as Ravi Zacharias' former opponent had to agree, "does seem to keep popping up, doesn't it?" Not everything is relative we must admit -- but we are all relatives and that is often where the trouble starts.

Now I am really tired! Aren't you?