Techies 34: Hatchback Wars

IT IS ONNN... as the marketing head from BMW says... BMW now launches its hatchback.. the first ever I series.. the i3... well its against Mercedes A class. BMW i3 will run on electricity.Designed and built from the ground up to run solely on electric power, it is, as we found out earlier this month during a prototype drive, a remarkably good little thing.

The salient details are blindingly simple. It's got a 170bhp electric motor, generating 184lb ft of torque instantly, powered by a 230kg high voltage battery that consists of eight modules, sending drive to the rear wheels - and rear wheels alone. This keeps the steering uncorrupted, and gives it a tight turning circle.
It's light, too. The body is extrememly lightweight, made from a range of materials including carbon fibre reinforced plastic, aluminium and even wood, meaning the whole thing weighs in at just 1195kg. The suspension is made from forged aluminium, the drive shafts are hollow, the 19in forged aluminium wheels are 36 per cent lighter than equivalent steel rims, the door trim is made from renewable materials, and even the ruddy screws and bolts are lightweight aluminium.
That low kerb weight means engineers could make the battery smaller for a given range, which cuts more weight itself, and allied to the 170bhp motor and carbon fibre body, this results in a 0-62mph time of 7.2 seconds. Far from shabby, then. More importantly, it'll do 0-37mph in just 3.7 seconds, a far more accurate reflection of its potential around town, while top speed sits at 93mph.

Of course, with any electric car, the usual talk of ‘range-anxiety' will inevitably rear its head. As such, the ‘standard' BMW i3 offers between 80 to 100 miles, but BMW also offers a i3 Range Extender. That car comes with a tiny 650cc petrol engine developing 34bhp, mounted next to the electric motor just above the rear axle, that powers a generator to recharge the battery. There's a tiny nine-litre fuel tank, and although the 0-62mph sprint for this models drops by over half a second to 7.9s, crucially, you get between 160 and 186 miles of claimed range.
BMW reckons you can even drive the i3 using just one pedal. Obviously, there are brake and accelerator pedals, but as soon as you lift off the accelerator, the motor switches immediately from drive to generator, feeding power back into the battery. The side-effect of this is to slow the car down. If this brake-energy regen causes the same effect as proper braking, the i3 even illuminates the brake lights.

Now, when we tested the prototype i3, the motor braking wasn't as powerful as in the Mini E. But, because it's RWD, any more power on the rear brakes would make it unstable on slippery surfaces. That's not really ideal.

Inside, there's the option of four different interiors, allowing buyers to customize the interior to their specification, all featuring sustainable materials including wood, natural fibres and naturally tanned leather.

At this point, you're probably wondering about a couple of things - recharging and, erm, price. Well, the standard ‘Fast Charging' unit will replenish the battery up to 80 per cent within three hours - with a special BMW ‘Wallbox' - or between eight and ten hours from a standard household socket. And as for price? Prices for the standard i3 start at Rs 20,00,000.

It'll go on sale in November this year, though you'll be able to order it from August.

Techies 33:Lenticular clouds

We think these clouds look like delicious wisps of marshmallow! But did you know that this type of cloud is also often mistaken as a UFO? Due to their often saucer-like shape, some people tend to jump to the wrong conclusion! 

So how are Lenticular clouds formed? They are formed when a current of moist air is forced upwards as it travels over a mountain, causing the moisture to condense and form a cloud. Lenticular clouds also tend to hang around in the same stationary position for days. This is because the flow of moist air continually resupplies the cloud with the moisture it needs to retain its position and shape.

It is also interesting that this lenticular cloud is hovering over these large fans. It is these large fans that are able to supply a constant flow of air to the cloud.

Techies 32

Dell is reportedly investing in wearable tech, with an eye to developing smartwatch devices, according to a report from The Guardian. Dell itself is saying that it’s looking closely at the wearable-tech trend, with the aim of predicting what personal computing will look like in five years’ time. Sure, it’s a smart move, but it’s also an obvious one: If there’s a computer company out there with an R&D department that isn’t at least exploring wearables, they should probably just pack it in.

Of course, Dell isn’t doing anything different from what it has done for the past decade or so with R&D efforts aimed at a five-year outlook for wearables. Which is to say it’s probably missing the boat.Google is getting ready to ship its first bold experiment with Google Glass. And Apple is said to beprepping an iWatch to ship, possibly as soon as later this year, prompting the company to secure trademarks for the iWatch name in a variety of different global markets.

If this does become a trend, and if consumers actually like it and embrace it as the next wave in personal computing, Dell will be years late and probably offer something uninspiring and derivative, the same way it did with PDA and mobile/smartphone tech.

Dell had a really bad recent financial quarter, and is seeing its global share of PC sales slip continually – not great when that’s a market that’s already facing problems. News that it’s looking to wearables as a life raft shouldn’t exactly be taken as uplifting, but at least it’s a sign the company still has a pulse.

Recent Floods in Uttrakhand region, left not only the people of Uttrakhand but also the whole country with tears. Death tolls to a 1000, more than 1000 missing and 7-10 thousand people are still stuck there.. If someone you know was lost in this, is still missing.. you can check here..

Techies: 31

Nokia Watchout...Something about real wireless charging 

Yes, this is the most trending tech news now adays charging your smartfone without wires, and please when i am talking about wireless technology i am not even talking about a dock based charging. This is going to be revolutionary guys. As per the latets news Intel is the new company to join the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP). The A4WP technology uses near-field magnetic resonance technology to wirelessly charge devices. Intel joins several giants including Samsung, Qualcomm, LG and HTC as a board member of the group. The group has a total of 40 global, technology industry leaders. The aim of A4Wp is to create a wireless power transfer (WPT) ecosystem that delivers spatial freedom in the user experience and industrial design of wireless battery charging of portable consumer electronics device.

Regarding the new alliance, Navin Shenoy, vice president, PC client group and general manager, mobile client platform division at Intel said

Intel believes the A4WP specification, particularly the use of near-field magnetic resonance technology, can provide a compelling consumer experience and enable new usage models that make device charging almost automatic. In joining A4WP, we look forward to working alongside other member companies and contributing to standards that help fuel an ecosystem of innovative solutions capable of simultaneously charging a range of devices, from low-power accessories to smartphones, tablets and Ultrabooks.

Qualcomm introduced WiPower Technology that was approved in January, 2013, by the Alliance for Wireless Power. It wirelessly powers mobile phones, tablets, and more devices using inductive wireless energy transfer  that doesn’t require you to precisely position a device on a charging area. Hope we can expect some new technology based on this from Intel soon.

Romans 8 : on revenge and forgiveness

We hate everything about bullies — the bullying, the being bullied, and the standing by silently while someone else is being bullied.  The bully feels helpless in the face of his own senseless rage.  The victim feels oddly and wrongly ashamed, as if something in their very being invited mistreatment.  The silent bystander feels in some ways worst of all, both victim and victimizer, complicit in guilt and yet deemed worthless enough by the bully to be subjected to watching their crime.
I once heard a Vietnam vet describe the concept of what he called “third party forgiveness.”  He said we need to forgive not just the things others have done to us; or the things we have done to others; but also the things we have seen others do to other people.
That’s a lot of forgiving.
The problem is there is something inside all of us that prizes revenge.  ”I hope that man that incarcerated those three women for ten years DOESN’T get the death penalty,” someone said to me yesterday about Ariel Castro.  ”I hope he is put in a prison where others mistreat HIM, so he experiences the same thing he did to those women.”
Holocaust victim Elie Weisel said something similar about Bernie Madoff.  Weisel should know better.  He wrote in his memoir Night that when the Nazis treated him like an animal, he found himself behaving like one.  And yet when Weisel lost most of his money to Madoff’s ponzi scheme, Weisel wrote that he hoped Madoff would spend the rest of his life in a prison cell with a video running 24-7 of his victims.  Weisel said this before Madoff’s son committed suicide.  I’m not sure if Weisel still feels Madoff needs a 24-7 video after that kind of a consequence.
Why do we want bullies, criminals and other people who have maimed us to experience the hurt they inflicted?  Why do we want to exact an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?  What is it in us that has an automatic revenge button that gets triggered the moment someone hurts us?
Is it possible that we each have a sense of divine justice?  Are we humans so made in God’s image that we automatically know that a wrong must be punished? Do we have God’s laws written on our hearts, as the Bible says of our consciences?  I can’t think of any other explanation.
And yet when we talk of exacting revenge like this, we forget the most important thing.  If our sense of justice comes from God, why do we find it so hard to trust that same God to exact justice in the best possible way?  That is part of what Paul is trying to get at here in Romans 8.  He’s saying who are we to argue with God?  God is the potter.  We are the clay.  Part of peace comes from recognizing that the potter has the right to do whatever He wants with the clay.  Romans 9:20-22.
No one could read about the hell house those three victims of Ariel Castro lived in without weeping.  The policemen who released the women were crying.  The women saw the sunshine twice in ten years. We feel the pain of those three women, even as we know we can’t even imagine their pain — and that, too, is part of our pain.  We are the bystanders who want to suffer for others but can’t.
Luckily for us, we have a God who did suffer for us.  The potter could have broken every one of us clay jars.  Instead, God became clay Himself.  He was broken for us.  He suffered the pain of hell so we wouldn’t have to.
Because His justice was satisfied on the cross, God forgives us, but His only condition is that we forgive each other.  He wants us to forgive the things we see others do to others.  He begs us to let go of hurts others have inflicted on us.  He longs for us to receive His forgiveness.  He says it’s the only way to heal.
If someone really needs to see a video 24-7 of all the wrongs they’ve inflicted on other people, God can do that, too, by playing it on the screens of their minds.  Maybe that’s already happened to Madoff.  Who knows. But maybe not, because we humans don’t really know what kind of spiritual torture other people deserve.  We don’t know what kind of suffering their consciences have imposed on them.  We don’t know what kind of suffering their hard hearts have given them.
There is nothing more painful than having a hard heart.  Hard hearts condemn us to live in a world of hate, rage, suspicion and loneliness.  All crimes come from hard hearts.  No matter whether we are cruel to others, indifferent, thoughtless or actively malicious, everything evil we’ve ever done comes from the same source: a hard heart.
A hard heart can only be broken with softness.  God has a soft heart toward us that offers us only kindness, sweetness, love and mercy.  We don’t really understand mercy.  It’s not our natural response.  But while we may not understand it, if we go there we discover it’s the best place to live.  It’s a tender place.  It’s a vulnerable place.  It’s a scary place.  And it requires knowing we need mercy.  It requires letting go of justice and the law and “well I did THAT so maybe I didn’t do THAT but you did THIS and I deserve THAT.” It lets us instead focus on God’s forgiveness for us, not on focusing on what others have done wrong.  Only when we accept the need for mercy can we love others – all others — even the bullies.  Even when we have met the bully and he is us.

Romans 7 : how to be the fastest runner

For anyone who anxiously studies the best way to do things, the New York Times ran a heartening article last fall on the best way to run.  A highly scientific study concluded that there is no one best way to run.  Myths of Running, October 15, 2012.   Hallelujah.  Just knowing that is liberating.  We can take one anxiety off the check list of our brains when we run.  We no longer have to worry about whether our heel, midfoot or frontfoot is striking first.   Because I don’t know about you, but anytime I go running I’m constantly trying to outsmart myself.  I’m trying to trick myself into going faster just a “little” longer; or in sprinting just to the “next bend”; or telling myself to at least try to pass that 100 year old woman who is walking faster than I can run….
But when we engage in those kind of mind games, how can there be two parts of our brain?  It’s the kind of interesting dichotomy brought to life so well in The Inner Game of Tennis.  We have an inner self who is condemning and judgmental and who makes the performer in us freeze up.  And then we all have a self who can just let go, who performs far better.  Fine.  Great.  Got it.  But how do we use our “self” to let go of our “self”?  We know there’s a jolly happy relaxed self who could beat Federer.  But how do we use our jolly self to outsmart our inner Cruella deVille??
It seems paradoxical to just try harder.  I mean, how are you supposed to “try harder” in order to get into the zone where we stop trying??
Here in this famous chapter of Romans 7, Saint Paul leaps straight into the heart of this paradox.  His despairing cries about human nature suggest that trying harder only backfires.  Here’s what he says about himself:  ”I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it.  Instead, I do what I hate… I want to do what is good, but I don’t.  I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.”  Romans 7:15, and 18-19.
I love his honesty.  Most people like to say they’re good.  They like to say all you have to do is try hard to be a good person.  They say that’s enough.
But I don’t think they believe it.  Why else do so many people overdrink, overeat, procrastinate, pop anti-anxiety medication or focusing medication or anti-depression medication; hate their to-do lists, ignore their children, be rude to their parents, obsessively collect mailboxes or car tires or baptismal fonts?  What is behind all the nonsensical crazy things we know other people do – and therefore have to admit, in our heart of hearts, that we must do also since it’s logically impossible that we’re the only person who doesn’t act a little crazy sometimes?  Maybe we don’t thieve from the tills at work.  But we all have our stuff, the things we want to do but just can’t seem to do.  For Paul it was coveting.  He says it’s as if there’s this dark power at work inside of him and the moment someone tells him what is right to do, the dark power tells him to do the opposite.  He says there’s a war going on inside him, and he feels buffeted by it. More than that, he says he feels like a “slave” to the dark powers inside of him – as if no matter how hard he tries, “inevitably” he can’t make himself choose the lifegiving ways of, for instance, not coveting.
I think King Solomon put it best when he said the hearts of people are full of evil and there is “madness” in our hearts while we live.  Ecc. 9:3 (NIV).  What else but evil accounts for exploding bombs at the finish line of a marathon?  Solomon’s words cut through the age old debate of whether evil people are crazy.  He just says that evil IS “madness.”  It’s “mad” to want to hurt others – of course it is – and yet we’ve all done it.  Our mouths act like bombs sometimes, going off when we least expect it and maiming all within earshot.  Or we might tell ourselves not to EVER worry again – whether because we are starting to trust God, or for the practical reason that we’ve figured out worry doesn’t help anything – and then we immediately find ourselves worrying over the dumbest things.  ”Stop worrying,” we order ourselves in frustration, only to realize that now we’re worried that we’re worried.  Trying harder can just make us feel miserable.
It’s enough to make us cry, along with Saint Paul, o who can free us from all this?? Romans 7:24.
The answer is not to trick ourselves into obedience – like my friend who likes to imagine scary evil people running after him to make himself run faster.  It’s not to say God or our mother or our neighbor will hate us if we don’t tow the line.  Instead, Paul is talking about a way of living inside of the zone.  It’s a zone of acceptance.  It’s a place without condemnation.  It’s a land of joy.  When we accept the truth of Saint Paul’s riff on human nature – that evil and madness are within our hearts – we can give up.  We can stop pretending to ourselves and others and instead surrender to God.  That’s when we get to do what Paul calls “living in the Spirit.”  We get to live in the land of grace.  We live in the joy of God’s love, a joy based not on our performance but just on existing.  It’s the joy of knowing we belong to Him because He made us.
The key to receiving all this is admitting we need it.  Admitting our wayward nature opens the door for God to do the work.  He did it on the cross.  We don’t have to try harder.  We let go, and God does the rest.  God cannot work with us when we’re pretending we don’t need Him.  A doctor can only heal someone who knows they’re sick.  We have to be willing to swallow whatever medicine God gives us.  And if we are finally willing to give up trying harder to be good, God comes in and fills us with His love instead.  He paid the price for all those times even 100 year old women walk faster than we can try to sprint through life.  We stop trying to be full of “good deeds” that fool nobody except maybe ourselves, and then only on a good day, and instead we ask for mercy.
Mercy is a beautiful thing.  It looks weak but it’s strong.  When we receive mercy – God’s undeserved love – it fills us with joy.  It fills us with strength.  It gives us boundless energy.  We lose our anxiety.  We can focus on the task at hand.  We can live in the moment.  Jesus is “the answer,” as Paul concludes here.  Romans 7:25.  He’s the answer to every problem, to every issue, to every time we try harder only to have it backfire.
Our response to mercy is to be thankful.  Being thankful makes us feel like we’re running so fast we don’t even notice if anyone is passing us.  It’s like going for a long run with our i-pods set on All Songs.  No matter what comes next, it’s always a song we love.  We don’t have to try harder.  We can relax into it.  After all, when we let go, God carries us.  There is no paradox.  It only seemed like one because we thought it was up to us.  But when we surrender, God can finally take care of us the way he has always longed to.  His love makes us move faster than any runner on earth because in His arms, we fly.

Walking on water

The day after Easter I woke to one of those dawns that has to speak for itself.
It started slowly.

I was longing for coffee and room service hadn’t opened yet.  I thought the dawn was over.  So with nothing else to do, I kept watching without expectation.  The sky pinked.

Entranced, I kept watching. Beams of light shot out from behind the clouds.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, the light triangulated.  I looked around.  Was I the only one watching this?  I began to get overwhelmed.  Was God putting on a light show for me alone?  Come to me, God promises, and I will show you great and wonderful things you do not know.

The sun kept moving in the sky, and the lightbrush moved with it.

I stopped texting phone photos to girlfriend and kept my real camera fixed on the light.  It was changing by the second now, and if I’d taken my eyes off it I might have missed something.  I drew closer.

 And then closer.

The sunlight was walking on the water.

The heavens were telling the glory of God.

Who am I that thou art mindful of me?

Romans 6 : on the love that blossoms in caregiving

I used to fear about a thousand and one things in life.  Breast cancer was my deepest dread.  Actually scratch that.  It was about a billion and one things I feared.  I was haunted by everything from being attacked by wild birds, Hitchcock-like, to failing on my exams, to saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, to losing a limb, to losing my teeth, to, well…  you get the picture. And then something strange happened.  I discovered there were all these things I thought I HAD to have to be happy.  Yet when I got them I was kind of like, well, … yawn.
That kind of revelation can cut many ways, right?  You can start to think you don’t want anything.  That’s a zen life.  It’s a letting go of all desires.  But who wants to live without desires? It’s like being a zombie.  Desires are the lifeblood of our existence.  So maybe instead, we have to figure out what we REALLY desire and hold the rest of our lives lightly.  Maybe we have to learn not to “set our hearts” on things we don’t really want.  But how?
To answer that, it might help to walk around inside something we think we DON’T want, something we fear, which for many of us is caregiving.  I mean real caregiving – feeding, bathing and bandaging someone who is messy sick.  A few people are gifted in that area.  But most of us fear it.  When my Dad was sick, I left the true caregiving to my mother and the nurses.  I was happy to sit on the arm of his chair and entertain him.  And if there had been no other caregivers, I’m sure I would have rallied.  But I wasn’t jumping into the fray.
I shouldn’t have feared it.  Because I had already learned something curious about caregiving that came from having children.  Before I had my own, I didn’t “get” babies.  What were you supposed to DO with a baby?  Aren’t they boring?  And who in their right mind would want to change a smelly diaper?
Everyone told me you had to wait until you had your own baby to get it.  They said you find your own babies beautiful and fascinating. They were right, of course.  But like most things in life, you can’t really understand that until you experience it for yourself.
When my son was born, they popped him straight into the ICU.  He was healthy as a clam, but they wanted to make sure because he had been born with a cleft lip and palate.  So he lay on his little side wearing the blue and white striped hat that New York Hospital slips on every baby’s head.  I sat on the other side of his incubator and watched him.  He had the sweetest most contented look on his face you’ve ever seen , and BOOM.  I fell in love.
We brought him home, and he kind of just sat there.  ”He doesn’t do anything,” I complained to the baby nurse.
“Look at his hands,” she said.
I looked.  He couldn’t move.  His cries were the volume of a baby eagle’s.  But his little hands were waving in the air as if he were conducting music only he could hear. I was entranced.  I discovered I could watch him for hours.
When you look with eyes of love at another human, EVERYTHING they do becomes endlessly fascinating.
But there’s something even more fascinating about babies.  It happens as a result not just of watching them relax in a cute hat or wave their tiny little hands, but when you look after them.  There’s a love that blossoms in caregiving.   There’s a depth of passion that arises only from bathing, feeding and changing them at their messiest.
And if your child has a medical need, you discover that the deeper their need the more your love blossoms.  The doctors told us that newborn skin is almost as malleable as foetal skin.  So the moment my son was born, the doctors at NYU Medical Center crafted a moulding plate for his gums and nose to help his features grow in the right direction.  That meant I had to glue bandages on the delicate skin of his cheeks, rip them off twice a day and reglue them back on no matter how blistered and sore his little cheeks got.  I wouldn’t let anyone else do it, even though it killed me every time.  He had two operations before he was a year old.  In the grand scheme of things, my baby’s medical issues were nothing.  And at age eighteen now, he looks fabulous.  He’s having what will hopefully be his last surgery this summer, an enormously complicated jaw surgery, and he seems as completely relaxed about it as he is about most things.  His calm gives me permission to be calm. But eighteen years ago, when he was my first baby, ANYTHING that went wrong turned me into a tense mess.
“This too shall pass,” that same baby nurse told me, every time my baby screamed.
“Right,” I thought, sarcastically.
She was right.  I didn’t know it then.  But the more I fussed over him and tended to his ripped skin and wept over his little bloody stitches, the more my own love grew.  The deeper his need, the more I loved.
It’s this kind of deep love that arises only from caregiving that Carol Mithers wrote about so movingly in the NY Times recently:
“I wasn’t one of those women who went all dewy-eyed with love the second she gave birth.  Within two weeks, though, I was transformed, flattened by a passion I had never even dreamed existed, and it was the grunt work of motherhood that did it to me, the holding, touching, watching, feeding, smelling.  I had always imagined that you put up with the job of caring for a baby because you loved her, but for me it was the unfathomable, slightly terrifying intimacy of caregiving that brought the love.”
“And with my old people it was the same.  Just as it is with a baby, your job is tending, and the comfort you bring is simple and physical.  You come to know the precise texture of thin, dry skin, the kind of touch that pleases, the small things that bring a smile.”  New York Times, Tuesday March 26, 2013, “Suddenly They’re All Gone.”
Mithers is right.  It’s the caregiving that brings the love.  And yet, we fear being needy.  We don’t want to let anyone take care of us.  We resist asking for help.  We shouldn’t, of course.  It’s our neediness that can allow the love of others to blossom.  And isn’t one of our deepest desires to be loved?  But apparently we have an equally strong contrasting desire, which is to be independent.
So we all seem to have a built in mechanism that prevents us from getting the very thing we most want.
Luckily for us, the one who created us already knows this about us.  His sacrifice bridges the gap between what we want and how we act in a way that prevents us from getting what we want.  His tender passion for us on the cross, a passion that will be spoken about, re-enacted and sung about this Easter weekend, is the deepest act of caregiving of all.  He cared for our deepest desire, the desire for unconditional love.  He took the physical, emotional and spiritual wounds we deserve, so we can be healed of our spiritual sickness.
We resist hearing that.  We don’t want to be dependent on anyone, especially not God.  We don’t want to be beholden.  We don’t want to have to obey Him.  We want the seeming “freedom” to do our own thing.
What we fail to realize is that dependence on God is what we were made for.  We’re at our happiest and most fulfilled when we swim in the waters for which we were bred.   The more we need God, the more we rely on Him.  And only when we are utterly dependent on Him, can He use us for His purposes.  When we rely on ourselves, we are wandering in mazes lost.
That’s the truth we get to walk around inside of for the rest of our lives.  And what we discover when we do that is that God’s love IS the desire that thrills us: “In Him, we live and move and have our being”.   Acts 17:27.  St. Luke’s words almost shout their way off the page.  We LIVE in Jesus.  We have our “being” in God.  We breathe in His breath.  That is our deepest desire.  And the more we begin to trust Him and His love, the more we can face all our fears with peace.
My son’s baby nurse wasn’t quite right.  Some things in this world don’t “pass”.  Some diseases are terminal.  Some limbs can never be restored.  We’re not glass lizards, able to regrow our own tails.  Everyone has a crucifixion to undergo on this earth, and some are far worse than others.  But there is one crucifixion that releases each of us.  It happens when we “die” to ourselves and our ideas of what we need. Usually it happens because God allows the things we thought we had to have to be ripped from our hands, and we feel like we’re dying.  Yet if we turn to Him in our need, He cares for us.  In His hands, we discover a love blossoming that is greater than anything we’d ever known or imagined.  It’s through this process of discovery Paul describes here in Romans 6 that we decide we no longer want so strongly the things God says are bad for us, and we decide we want Him more.  Romans 6:6.
And as we grow in trust, and begin to feel God’s love blossom inside us as we allow Him to care for us, God opens our eyes to the truth that the things we dread most can bring us the greatest joy of all.

Romans 5 : the gift of feeling useless

Some days we don’t feel ourselves.  We feel blechy.  Our bodies don’t want to function at their peak capacity.  We need a vacation, but the only thing outside is a grey sky.  We feel restless.  Feeling useless can feel almost like hunger, but eating doesn’t make it go away.  We wonder what’s wrong.  Usually we can bounce out of the feeling by achieving something.  But when we feel less than zippy, it’s hard to achieve anything.  Those are the days we feel our worst, and yet they’re the very days that can be our best.  Why?  Because those days are opportunities to explore what it means to be just us. Who are we when we’re not achieving something?  Who are we when we – gasp – don’t get to brag about anything because we can’t think of one thing we’re good at?  Who are we when we don’t have the energy to remind ourselves of what separates us from the crowd?  Who are we when there is no crowd?
We just are.
And that’s enough.  Except we forget that.  We thought we had to prove ourselves not just to other people, but to ourselves.  But really?  What exactly are we trying to prove?  Who is the one setting up this standard?  Where does our idea of perfect come from?
Perfect comes, by definition, from our perfect God.  And we somehow get it all backwards.  We think WE have to be perfect, but the truth is, He is the only perfect one.  And in His perfection, He loves us no matter how useless we are or feel and He longs to cover us with Himself.
That’s why those days when we feel under the weather are blessings.  Those days we want to crawl right back into bed are opportunities.  Those times when we don’t want to work out – or work –  are gifts.  Our weaknesses are a door.  They’re a way into a place we would never willingly go on our own.  The more we are stripped of our own gifts, the more we are forced to ask for God’s help.  To ask for help means we don’t have it all in ourselves.
That was true all along.  We just forgot.
If we ask for help from the one who loves us just because, we discover that our weaknesses open us up to the world of grace.  They unlock the closed barren places in our hearts that can only blossom in the presence of unconditional love.  We move from the emptiness we feel when we can’t achieve, into a fullness we couldn’t have even imagined.  We discover a new joy and a confidence that “lasts”.  Romans 5:2.
It’s this kind of experience of learning to depend on God, I think, that informs these seemingly difficult words of Paul about how we “can rejoice… when we run into problems and trials.”  Romans 5:3.  It’s not just because, as Pink sings, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  It’s that the strong you discover when you rely on the Lord, is the most beautiful strong of all.  When Paul here talks about endurance, strength of character and hope, he’s not using these words the way we usually do.  It’s not a white knuckle grip on our humanity.  He’s talking about enduring anything in God’s presence; about a strength that comes from relying on God’s strength instead of our own; about character honed in the furnace of humility, where we yearn for a godly character and discover how short we fall; and a hope in God rather than in a change in our circumstances.  Romans 5:3-4.  This is not the mantra of self-reliance or a muscular kind of Christianity.  It’s the tearful grateful joy of the one who relies on the cross alone.
We often think the cross is a symbol of condemnation.  Paul reminds us it’s really a symbol of how God loves us even at our weakest.  God died to restore his “friendship” with us when we were “helpless.”  Romans 5:6, and 10.
So our weaknesses are an opportunity to walk more closely with God.  They’re an opportunity for us to let God do what He longs to:  ”to fill our hearts with love”.  Romans 5:5.  We discover in our helplessness something glorious.  We find the power of our “wonderful new relationship with God.”  Romans 5:11.  It’s the power of a love based only on God and not on anything we’ve done.
Knowing that lifts our heads up high.  It restores the light to our eyes.  It puts a new song in our hearts.  It makes us smile from the inside out.  We start to realize that just being WITH God gives our lives the sense of purpose and destiny we’ve always longed for.  Worshipping Him and being thankful to Him lift our spirits higher than the heavens.  So we start asking not whether we’re being “useful” but whether we’re in God’s presence.  And THAT is a question we can always answer in the positive.