Peace, Love, and Marijuana

Our friend George Dunn joined us on Thursday morning and asked, "Did anybody ever read Yoder?"  Curtis said, "Yes but he was killed with a light saber" which made some of us to laugh.  Someone said that they could see what kind of a conversation this was going to be.

George told us that he wanted to talk about the importance of having a fruitful life.  He said that he had learned a while back that a person is not defined by their rhetoric or theology but by the kind of life that they live.  He went on to say that faith is not about rewards and punishments in a future life but that the good news is that we can all have an abundant life in the present.

We talked a bit about how the abundant life is not about presenting a certain image but is rather the outgrowth of our character, our deepest selves.  Someone said that fruit may look good on the outside but can be rotten within.  Joelle said that when she was a kid that they used to eat crab apples.  She said, "It's like we ate those things thinking the taste would change" which made us laugh.  George said that his 27 year old son used to call kids that looked like skateboarders but didn't know anything about it "posers."  His son had wanted to be a professional skater before he was injured.  He said that if kids didn't know what a 360 kick flip was he knew that they weren't real skaters.

George said that we all go through seasons of fruitfulness and barrenness in our lives.  He said that what really mattered in life was a character based on qualities like love, joy, peace, patience, generosity and things like that.  He said that those things define a person far more than what we see from the outside.  At this Curtis showed us a hat that George had given him that he wears all the time and that we think makes him look like a smaller version of the professional wrestler known as The Undertaker.  Curtis said that he loved that hat and was grateful that George had given it to him.  Our friend Marney said that for her it was important to give cheerfully in order for it to be productive.

As the conversation moved toward a conclusion Curtis said that you know when  you have been given a gift.  He said that one of his gifts was compassion.  He told us that he had helped two couples just last evening that were having some relationship problems.  One of the couples had told him, "you make us feel better."  At this Joelle said that she couldn't sleep last night and found herself watching Woodstock The Movie at around 3:00 am.  She said it was the perfect example of diverse people coming together in peace and love to support each other.  George added that it might also have had something to do with the marijuana which made us laugh.