Miles of Smiles Around the World?

He’s a Spanish-born lawyer, but you’d never know it from his big red nose. Alvaro Neal has chucked the legal world for his true pas­sion: mak­ing peo­ple smile. He has trav­eled 50 thou­sand kilo­me­ters by bicy­cle into Pak­istan, where he per­forms at a school for home­less children.

When I was in col­lege, I took an elec­tive on Web­Page Devel­op­ment. I remem­ber our pro­fes­sor telling the class that if you are mak­ing a web­page, you have to design it in such a way that the web­page comes out in the world wide web in seven sec­onds flat. Appar­ently, stud­ies have shown that seven sec­onds is how long an inter­net “surfer” will wait for a web­page to load before he exits to another site. So that if you want your site to be vis­ited at all, you have to beat the seven-second attention-span limit of the aver­age inter­net surfer. That was five years ago. I do not know if that stan­dard still stands today—it prob­a­bly is even lower than seven seconds.

60: Church Simplified">

I first heard about them when my office­mates gave me rave reviews about their expe­ri­ence of a dif­fer­ent kind of Sta­tion of the Cross in Boni­fa­cio High­street (see video below). I even­tu­ally became a face­book fan, and as with many things face­book, the rest is his­tory (hehe). I found myself res­onat­ing with many things they espouse, and while I can­not talk about their phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­ogy at length since I have not joined any of their ser­vices myself, I think the con­cept of a Church that is sim­ple, open to very cre­ative ideas, and one that does not pros­e­ly­tize, is a real breath of fresh air, and some­thing that appeals to me.

Some weeks ago, I talked about GAINING YOUR SOUL, AND LOSING THE WORLD. And some­times, we can live in clear cut dual­i­ties of: “the world” vs. “not-of-this-world”, or “love” vs. “hate”, or heaven vs. hell. But more life is often­times gray more than black and white. And many times we are made to choose not between good and bad, but between bad and worse or good and bet­ter. That is when things get more com­pli­cated and not so clear cut. That is when DISCERNMENT becomes very important.

Today, let me talk about this in more detail.

There are moments in our lives when we feel so “in the zone” that every­thing we touch seem to turn into gold, and we really feel that we have all that it takes to make us happy. Not just the giddy happy we feel when we get a new ipod or mac­book pro, but the really deep joy we feel at our wed­ding and grad­u­a­tions.
But then just when we feel that every­thing is turn­ing out right, some­thing hap­pens and we come crash­ing down to earth. It is so easy to …