MJ Arts announces the opening of its retail store! Marty has dug through the image vaults from his 30 year illustration history, and combined his efforts with Society 6. Wearable art in various sizes and formats.
https://society6.com/mjartscom
The Doctor finally shows up in Amelia Pond’s life, twelve years late. The Doctor is trying to save the world from oblivion—
DOCTOR: … why should you trust me? I’ll let my best man explain. (sotto voce): Jeff, you’re my best man.
JEFF: Your what?
DOCTOR: Listen to me. In ten minutes, you’re going to be a legend. In ten minutes, everyone on that screen is going to be offering you any job you want. But first, you have to be magnificent. You have to make them trust you and get them working. This is it, Jeff, right here, right now. This is when you fly. Today’s the day you save the world.
JEFF: Why me?
DOCTOR: It’s your bedroom. Now go, go, go.
(The Doctor runs out.)
The Doctor always encourages people to be the best that Humanity can offer. Sadly, they don’t always live up to the expectation.
Be Extraordinary. I first heard these words my Senior year of High School, thanks to ‘Captain Bob’ Bonniwell. One of the teachers that changed my life.
At some point in the year, he played a long-playing record [yes, the dinosaur age] of the stage play, Man of La Mancha. The story awakened me. For the first time that I realized that my life didn’t have to just be about me and my parents, and the ordinary stuff of life. I learned that one can live life for a higher purpose.
“I will impersonate a man. His name… Alonso Quijana.
A country gentleman, no longer young. Being retired, he has much time for books. He studies them from morn till night and often through the night till morn again.
And all he reads oppresses him fills him with indignation at man’s murderous ways towards man.
He ponders the problem: How to make better a world where fraud, deceit, and malice are mingled with truth and sincerity. He broods and broods and broods and broods and broods and finally his brains dry up. He lays down the melancholy burden of sanity and conceives the strangest project ever imagined: to become a knight-errant, and sally forth to roam the world in search of adventures; to right all wrongs, to mount a crusade to raise up the weak and those in need…”
Be Extraordinary. I heard these words again, three years later, from the most unlikely source I could imagine. Like Jeff, the explanation was that it was my dorm room.
The story of another man, one who had not lost his sanity, but one who was filled with the same indignation. We might call him Joshua; he’d been trained as a craftsman. One day he decided that he would lay down his tools and set out ‘to roam his world, to right all wrongs, to mount a crusade, to raise up the weak and those in need.’
I met him in Eugene, Oregon in 1973, during the 3rd of my 5 years at University.
I’d heard about him earlier, while in Corvallis at Oregon State. Some people called him a god. I wasn’t interested in that; religion wasn’t any part of my upbringing. His followers were arrogant, rude and judgmental. I wanted to have nothing to do with him, or with them. I crossed the street when they approached.
In time I met Joshua. The odd thing being that he had been executed as a criminal some 1,940 years earlier. He’d also been brought back to life, and was still alive…Science Fiction right before my eyes.
I was watching “Poirot” tonight; he was chastising the characters in the story about believing in superstition—it had to do with murders associated with the opening of a 3,000 year old Egyptian burial chamber.
“Superstition” is a word I generally ignore [Stevie Wonder being one exception]. I started doing some googling and reading on the subject, and the unwelcome thought came to me—‘There are probably people in my life who consider me to be superstitious in my belief that there is a Creator of the Universe; and that [He] sometimes interacts with the world we know.”
To me, the idea of my being superstitious is preposterous; I know the struggle I had with accepting the concept of a Creator. C. S. Lewis was probably the biggest bridge I found—enabling me to overcome the unwilling suspension of my disbelief. Then the ‘incursions’ started coming. Odd things in my life, unexpected situations and strange timings; each being fairly innocuous by itself, but when added up over a period of time, fairly difficult to ignore, or accept as being merely coincidental…
I eventually started going to church, which was really odd. There are a lot of strange religious people in the world, and they go to church.
Mostly I was interested in the gatherings of this group of college students who seemed to have a different way of living life. A life as a follower of Jesus, [the transliteration of the Hebrew term, “Yehoshua”/Jehoshua (contracted to “Joshua”), which means “Yahweh saves” (or “Yahweh is salvation”)]. The next three to five years brought amazing insights into a world that has been surrounding me for my entire life; a world I hadn’t seen, would not have seen but for the Grace of the Creator. Science Fiction right before my eyes…
Following Jesus became the pattern of the rest of my life. Church, not as much, a statement which may surprise my children, if they read this. Nearly 40 years of Sunday mornings. All sorts of Sunday mornings. I attend Church because that is where people talk about following Jesus. Doesn’t happen all that much, elsewhere in my life. Not, that is, prior to Facebook…
There is a lot about church that I ignore or overlook.
It’s harder to overlook, in these days of unGrace.
I think this time in history is one of the things that brought tears to Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane. He didn’t die so that religious hatred could flourish.
From “Passion of the Christ”—the only shot I really enjoyed.
“Be extraordinary.”
Why do I write so often about the Man in the Blue Box?
Because he encourages people to be extraordinary. The world needs extraordinary people to bring us out of the mudhole my generation has dug ourselves into. I don’t find a lot of people in popular culture encouraging people to be extraordinary.
I believe that the Millennial Generation has the ability to change history; if they will simply get out and vote. There are a lot of people investing huge amounts of money in making sure that they don’t.
Be extraordinary.
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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 