Spiritual Maturity

If You Don’t Know Where You Are Going. . . .

One of my favorite episodes in the old TV series, The X-Files, was aptly named “Humbug.” The plot was easy enough to follow. The agents are called to investigate a strange murder in a Florida town inhabited by sideshow performers. And while the whodunit is fun (was it the Fiji Mermaid, the Dog-Faced Boy or one of the other people from the town?), the real story (at least for me) focused on one of the sideshow characters named Dr. Blockhead. Now, Dr. Blockhead was in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment by any means possible. One of the key scenes is when Scully found him torturing himself by being suspended by large hooks that ripped away at his flesh. When he saw that Scully could not grasp what he was doing, he explained: “It's a variation of a Native American sun dance ritual. I suspend myself by these hooks, and the pain

How Can I Look It Up When I Can’t Spell It?

True story. My parents had a friend who had made several bad life choices, and things were not looking up; but he had figured out a sure-fire solution to change that. Back in the day, if you were not a good speller, you were sunk. There was only one course of action: If you didn’t know how to spell a word, you had to look it up in the dictionary. But to many, that only added insult to injury: If you didn’t know how to spell it, how could you find it in a dictionary? Our friend had a solution. He created a dictionary of misspelled words. He figured out every possible way a word could be misspelled, wrote those words down phonetically and then put them in his own dictionary. It took years to put it together, but he figured it would sell like hätˌkākes. Unfortunately, right before he