What Does It Cost? (Luke 14:25-33; Proper 18C; September 8, 2013)

What Does It Cost?

Luke 14:25-33
Proper 18C
September 8, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

I remember my first contact with this congregation.  It was a meeting with the Staff/Pastor-Parish Relations Committee and our district superintend Anne Lippincott that Carol and I had at what we United Methodists in Iowa call a “put-in interview.”  It’s a chance for red flags to pop up that might make the pastoral appointment a bad idea.  But mostly it’s a chance for us to start to get to know each other. 

I don’t remember all of it, but I remember that one person observed, “It’s pretty easy to be a member of First United Methodist Church.  We don’t really ask a great deal.”  After three years here I can say that I agree.

It’s not that there aren’t people who pour themselves into this congregation heart, soul, strength and mind.  There are people like that.  But if you’re not one of them, we don’t send the participation police after you.

It’s not that there aren’t people who give generously, who even make lifestyle choices so that they can afford to give more.  There are people like that.  But if you’re not one of them, we don’t garnish your wages.

It’s not that there aren’t people who are here every Sunday, people who have a better record of attendance than I do, people for whom an absence would be a sign of something gone terribly wrong and a cue to call 911.  There are people like that.  But if you’re not one of them, we don’t send a truant officer.

You can be a member of First United Methodist Church without attending regularly, participating in any significant way in our ministries, and supporting our life and work financially.  We have no standards for membership.  The only time we will remove a member—actually, technically we never remove members; we move them to the inactive roll—the only time we remove a member is if we haven’t seen or heard from them in years and no one knows where they are or if they themselves ask for that action.

That may be a reason why nearly two-thirds of our members are inactive.  One of our bishops (I can’t remember which) has said, “If a system produces what a system is designed to produce, then the United Methodist Church must be designed to make inactive members.”  We certainly do make a lot of them.  We are a low-expectations organization.  It doesn’t cost much to be a member of First United Methodist Church. 

And there are benefits.  Not as many as there used to be, of course, but there are still some.

In my father’s day employers asked job applicants for their church membership.  Leaving the line blank was not an option.  In some occupations, it made a difference which church you claimed.  Mainline Protestant denominations were preferred.  That is, I am glad to say, no longer the case.

When I was a boy the National Council of Churches used to sponsor public service announcements.  Their tag line was, “The family that prays together, stays together.”  The theory was that going to church would lead to a lower divorce rate.  I have no idea what research supported that theory, but that idea is not entirely dead.

In fact, the idea that a church service should be of some direct benefit to the people who attend is very much alive.  We expect to “get something we can use” from the service and from the sermon especially.  Many people come to church with the hope that it will help them with the job of raising their children, a job that appears to have gotten harder in the last few decades.  The idea, I suppose, is that the church is a self-help movement and the Bible is a self-help manual.  Joining a church and reading the Bible—or hearing it decoded by the preacher—should bring the benefit of families that have fewer crises and are better able to get through the crises that they have.

As an aside I will that the trouble with this idea is that the Bible is not really interested in self-help and even less in families.  What it does have to say—about families in particular—is spectacularly unhelpful.  In order to turn the New Testament into a “family values” text, you have to limit yourself to a very few verses and even those have to be wrenched from their historical context.  The New Testament is not a family-friendly text because the movement that produced it was not a family-friendly movement.  That is a scandalous idea and there is more than one sermon in it, but this isn’t one of them.

No, I’m more struck by the expectations that we bring to church and, really, to every part of our lives that the things that we do, the things we’re involved with should yield more than they cost.  We’re not selfish about it.  We count it as a gain if our kids enjoy it or learn from it.  We count it as a gain if it makes our community or world better.  But we do expect that the gain will be more than the cost, that the income will exceed the loss, in short, that we will show a profit.  This is the measure of how much of the ideology of the market has leaked into our thinking and seeped into our very bones.

Maybe this isn’t new.  Maybe people have always thought this way.  Maybe people have always looked at life’s choices as a series of trades in which we should gain as much as possible and lose as little as possible.  Maybe even Jesus’ disciples, or would-be disciples, considered all of life under the metaphor of the market.  Maybe.

But Jesus turns this pattern on its head.  Belonging to First United Methodist Church may not be costly, but being a disciple of Jesus is very costly, indeed.  We may not ask very much of our members, but Jesus demands everything and makes no promises, at least here, about what we might get in return.

First, he demands that his would-be disciples “hate” their families.  Yes, I have a problem with that language, too.  In some families even to say the word “hate” is forbidden.  And here it is, from Jesus himself, laid out in all its ugliness, applied to the people who are closest to us, who have the greatest claim on our lives: parents, spouse, children, and siblings.  Not just applied but required, commanded of any who would follow Jesus. 

Now, maybe we have here what English teachers call hyperbole, exaggeration that is used deliberately for effect, you know, like “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” or “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times…”  But even if Jesus does not expect that his disciples will hate their families, it is clear that what binds Jesus’ followers to him is supposed to be stronger than what binds them to their own families. 

Second, in the same way, Jesus demands that his would-be disciples hate their own lives.  Again, Jesus must mean at very least that our commitment to Jesus’ and his teachings must be greater than our commitment to our own lives.

Third, we must give up all that we own.  I know our translation doesn’t put it that strongly.  I think that the translators lost their nerve at verse thirty-three.  “Unwilling to give up” does not translate the force of the original which requires that we “say goodbye to, or part from, or have done with, or renounce, or give up” the things that we own.

We aren’t even allowed the comfort of easing into these demands, either.  Jesus imagines two scenes—one involving building a tower, the other repelling an invasion—to suggest that we must decide before committing ourselves to the project of following him as his disciples whether or not we can pay the price.  We have to be “all in” or it doesn’t count.

If the reading had continued to the end of the story, just the next two verses, we would have heard Jesus say, “Salt is good.  But if salt loses its flavor, how will it become salty again?  It has no value, neither for the soil nor for the manure pile.  People throw it away.  Whoever has ears to hear should pay attention.”  Coming where it does, I think this means that the would-be disciples who are unwilling to set their families in second place, let go of their lives, and renounce their possessions are as peculiar, unnatural and finally useless as salt that isn’t salty.

This is a hard thing for Jesus to say.  It’s a hard thing for us to hear.  It seems like more than I can do.  Maybe it seems that way to you, too.  But this is the demand at the heart of Jesus’ invitation to follow him as his disciple.  Jesus has offered us what our tradition used to call “the counsels of perfection.” I find that I can neither fulfill them nor give them up.  I can’t make the leap.  I can only take one little step at a time.

Maybe this falls short of the way that Jesus lays it out for us here, but I don’t know any other way that any of us can do this, but one step at a time, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller.  I don’t know any other way to be a disciple of Jesus than to face one issue, one choice, one decision at a time and stretch as far as I can toward God’s hopes for me.  I don’t know any other way than to trust that God’s Spirit will never let me rest content with less than all that Jesus asks of me, but will always draw me further and always give me the strength to take that next little step on the journey.  In short, the only way I can live is in a kind of hopeful tension. 

If this is where you find yourself as well, let me suggest something.  It’s true that our congregation has very low requirements for membership.  Nevertheless it can be for you and me a place in which we can hear the sharp demands of Jesus.  It can be a place where we help each other to be clear about what Jesus is asking.  It can be a place where we can encourage each other to take whatever next step lies before each of us.  This congregation can be for us a place of hope.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Honey from the Rock (Jeremiah 2:14-13; Proper 17C; September 1, 2013)

Honey from the Rock

Jeremiah 2:14-13
Proper 17C
September 1, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

We recognize that the Bible is more for us than an ordinary book, that its words are read among us with a certain authority and that, taken together, and in ways that while neither simple nor direct nor even literal, they are nonetheless God’s word and come to us as a gift.  So I say, “The word of God for the people of God” and ask you to reply, “Thanks be to God.” 

Sometimes it’s easy to be thankful for the gift of a word from God.  At other times it’s harder.  Sometimes I’m surprised you don’t respond, “Thanks, but no thanks.”  Today is one of those times and Jeremiah is one of those readings.  This is one of those readings that give the Old Testament its reputation for being judgmental and negative.  This is one of those texts that make some people say that the God of the Old Testament is a God of judgment while the God of the New Testament is a God of love. 

In my opinion those who say that don’t know either the Old Testament or the New Testament well enough.  There is plenty of judgment in the New Testament and plenty of love in the Old, but I’ll concede that this text has plenty of wrath and not a whole of good news.  I promise to bring us to get us there, but first let’s listen to Jeremiah and try to understand where he’s coming from.

I confess that I like Jeremiah.  Without a doubt he’s my favorite prophet.  Some prophets—like II Isaiah—get to share a lot of good news.  They are prophets of comfort and encouragement.  Other prophets are stuck with announcing bad news.  Think, for example, of John the Baptist speaking to the religious authorities who had come to the Jordan to see what the fuss was about.  John had no time for them.  “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” he cried.  He seems to enjoy his message a lot, maybe too much.

But Jeremiah is stuck between his love for his people and God’s deep disappointment with them.  He delivers the message, but not without his struggles.  We overhear his candid exchanges with God.  We look over his shoulder as his pen pours out his anguish.  God’s demand for justice and Jeremiah’s people’s consistent refusal to act with justice are on a collision course.  Jeremiah can see the crash coming.  He does everything that he can think of to get Judah’s attention, to get it to put on the brakes, but Judah does not respond.  Judah has plugged up its ears.  Judah’s theology has rendered it deaf to Jeremiah’s pleading. 

Judah has come to believe its own press releases.  Judah presents itself as the great exception among all nations.  It is a chosen people and a privileged land.  Yahweh, the true God, has made a covenant with Judah that will last forever.  The people of Judah have inherited the land of Judah and it will be theirs forever.  The king of Judah has been enthroned on Mount Zion and his throne will last forever.  Yahweh has chosen the Temple as a dwelling place and will defend it against every threat for all time.

For Yahweh to fail to guarantee these things was unthinkable.  For Yahweh to abandon Judah, even temporarily, was impossible.  Yahweh was their God.  They were God’s people.  Call it Judean exceptionalism.

The king had a central place in this theology.  He was a descendant of David—yes, that David, the one with the slingshot.  God had promised never to let David’s dynasty fail.  David’s heir could hardly lose.  This made him bold.  God was not called the Yahweh of the Heaven Forces for nothing. 

The king also had two direct lines to God.  One was through the temple. The king provided the temple and its staff with everything they needed.  In their turn the priests made offerings and prayed on the king’s behalf.  The other line to God was the company of royal prophets.  The king would consult them about policy decisions.  They would consult God and then tell the king, “Yes, Yahweh is with you in all that you propose to do.”

In theory these lines were supposed to keep the king’s actions in line with Yahweh’s will, but in practice the king did what seemed good to him and the people around him all agreed.  In theory Judah should have done what was right and just.  In practice Judah did whatever was good for Judah and called it right and just.  Well, that’s not quite right.  In reality what Judah did was mostly good for Judah’s wealthy and powerful.  And then, after the decisions had been made, Judah’s relationship with Yahweh was used as window dressing, as cover.  Yahweh always figured prominently in the king’s press releases.  Every royal speech ended with “God bless you and God bless the kingdom of Judah.” 

I think the leaders actually believed their own press.  I don’t think it was a cynical attempt to manipulate public opinion.  I think they were sincere in their belief that God would take care of Judah, its temple, its king and, of course, its elite.  They were sincere.  They really believed that God would protect them.  Otherwise, we have to imagine that they were so stupid as to believe that they could thumb their noses at the Babylonians and get away with it.  They had fallen victim to their own spin doctors.  They were happy in their false confidence.

Jeremiah, on the other hand, was not taken in.  Jeremiah saw past the names and the false assurances.  Jeremiah saw that, while the leaders of Judah talked about Yahweh a lot, the god they talked about had very little in common with who Yahweh actually was.  In reality, the god they were calling Yahweh was a figment of their own imaginations, the projection of their own ambitions.  In short their version of “Yahweh” was an idol.  Why anyone who had a real God would give that up for an imitation was something that Jeremiah could not understand: “Has a nation switched gods, though they aren’t really gods at all?  Yet my people have exchanged their glory for what has no value…They have forsaken me, the spring of living water.  And they have dug wells, broken wells that can’t hold water.”  But whether he could understand it or not, Judah had done it, and Jeremiah could see it. 

And it tore at his heart.  I appreciate that.  I get it.  Every parent who watches his grown child doing something foolish knows this exasperated love.  Every patriot who sees her country making bad policy choices knows this devoted sorrow.  Take Thomas Jefferson, for example, who wrote in the context of slavery, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever…”[1]

Of course it is one thing to notice the gap between our ideals and our practice and quite another to bring the two together.  I have had more failure than success at closing that gap myself.  Still, it is the role of a prophet to say what she sees, even if she herself is among those accused.

On Wednesday last week thousands gathered in our nation’s capital to remember the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” of 1963.  We remember it, of course, for the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King, Jr.  We hear or read a few lines of that speech and we are moved.  But something funny happens inside our heads and the image we see is of people holding hands on a hilltop and singing a song which sounds more like an old Coca-cola jingle than the spiritual “Free at Last.”  The remembered version of King’s message has been sanitized; it has become safe.

And so maybe we don’t notice the yawning gaps.  But they are there.  For the President, for example, to interrupt his plans for attacking Syria to go to the Lincoln Memorial, say some stirring words of his own, and go back to the White House to continue his plans for war, betrays a failure to understand the core of King’s message that real peace can never come from cruise missiles.

Tomorrow we will celebrate Labor Day.  Some will spend the day in outdoor activities—and it does look like we’ll be blessed with another day of nearly perfect weather.  If retailers have their way, we’ll spend it scooping up bargains. 

But we observe Labor Day in a nation that increasingly despises laborers.  In 1963 they marched on Washington for jobs as well as freedom.  As King observed that day, the freedom to sit at a lunch counter doesn’t mean much if you can’t afford to buy a meal.  Under the heading of “jobs” they wanted “full employment,” job training programs that would impart real, marketable skills and an increase in the minimum wage from $1.25 an hour to $2.00.[2]  Important things came from the March, but the jobs demands were not met.  Since then the lot of minimum wage workers has declined.  $1.25 in 1963 would be worth $9.54 today.[3]  $2.00 would be worth $15.27.  Our current minimum wage is $7.25, three-quarters of what the minimum wage from a half century ago would be worth today.  We talk as if we honor labor, but we pay like we despise it.

It is the prophet’s unenviable task to shine a light into the dark places of our world, into the places where our practice contradicts our talk, the places where injustice is done for the sake of expedience or ease, the places where we have “forsaken springs of living water…[for] wells, broken wells that can’t hold water.”

Up to now it’s been bad news, the bad news that our shared life falls short of what God requires of—and hopes for—us.  I promised you I would get us to good news and I haven’t forgotten.  In the first place, bad news isn’t an entirely bad thing if it tells us the truth about ourselves.  I’ve never seen real change start in any other place than a painful truth reluctantly faced.

And that is the good news—we do not have to remain in this stuck place.  We can move, change, shift.  Our encounter with a disappointed God is not like a courtroom trial with a verdict followed by a sentence.  Our encounter with God is a story.  In this story God is not some sort of ideal, a principle of justice or some such.  In this story God is a complex character.  Yes, God is passionately committed to justice.  Yes, the present arrangement of things runs afoul of God’s passionate commitment.  But God is more than willing to forgive when we change our minds and change our ways.  God is looking for an excuse to speak more kindly.

I could show you the places in Jeremiah where God does precisely that, but Psalm 81 is already before us, so I’ll use it instead.  In Psalm 81, too, God has been disappointed in the covenant people.  They have turned away from the God who had delivered them from Egypt.  So God had turned away from them and let them “follow their own counsels,” do whatever they want.  But God’s hand is still stretched out to them, still offering them a way to renew the covenant, to begin again.  If they will take God’s hand, if they will change their minds and their ways, God will care for them.  They will eat the finest wheat, drenched with honey from the rock.  And they will be satisfied.  And so will we.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

---

[1] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1892-99), page 232.

[2] US Department of Labor, “History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938 – 2009,” http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm, accessed: August 30, 2013.

[3] Calculated using the calculator based on the Consumer Price Index found at: http://data.bls.gov/data/inflaction_calculator.htm.

A Day for Liberation (Luke 13:10-17; Proper 16C; August 25, 2013)

A Day for Liberation

Luke 13:10-17
Proper 16C
August 25, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

She looked like she bore the weight of the world on her shoulders.  And who knows?  Maybe she did.  She was “bent over and couldn’t stand up straight,” the story tells us.  She had been that way for eighteen years.  We can safely conclude that she wasn’t born that way.  If she had, the story would have mentioned that because it would have made her healing all the more remarkable.  Life somehow had done this to her. 

We might have said that she had osteoporosis, but the story says that she had been disabled by a spirit.  We smile at such a naïve, superstitious detail, but maybe there was more than the merely physical going on.  At least we should recognize that a condition like this, if it didn’t begin in the spirit, certainly had an impact on the spirit.  Can anyone bear such a burden for eighteen years and not be profoundly changed by it?

She was in synagogue on the Sabbath, hoping for some good news.  There was lots of news, but mostly it was the same old news, none of it the kind that would change her world for the better.  The Romans were particularly testy lately and everyone was on edge after some Galileans had been murdered by Pilate while they were offering sacrifices.  What did it mean?  What had they been doing to deserve such a thing?  What more can we do to stay out of trouble and avoid the notice of the Romans than we are already doing?

Some of the news was closer to home.  Sarah’s husband Judas had been robbed while coming home from the market town after selling some sheep.  The thieves took the money, of course, but they also left Judas badly wounded.  He would live but healing would be a long time in coming.  What were Sarah and her family going to do in the meantime?  They already owed the money lender.  Would he demand their land?  And then what would become of them?

Another neighbor, Isabel, had just given birth.  The baby boy was doing well, but Isabel was in bed with a fever.  This was the third day and the crisis would come soon.

This bent woman, this dispirited woman, this woman who bore the weight of the world on her shoulders was in synagogue on Shabbat, hoping for some good news.  Shabbat should have been a good day for good news.

That it was not was not the fault of the day itself.  In fact the Sabbath was remarkable.  It was a part of the oldest Jewish traditions.  The Sabbath is the fourth of the Ten Commandments that were given to lay out for Israel a way of life that stood in contrast to their life as slaves in Egypt.  There they served the gods of Empire and had little in the way of genuinely human community.  And especially they had no rest.  Exodus describes it this way: “[T]he Egyptians put foremen of forced work gangs over the Israelites to harass them with hard work.  They had to build storage cities named Pithom and Rameses for Pharaoh…They made their lives miserable with hard labor, making mortar and bricks, doing field work, and by forcing them to do all kinds of other cruel work.” 

The Empire du jour, Egypt, demanded unending work from the Israelites, work without end, work without rest.  When the Israelites tried some collective bargaining, the Egyptians responded by making their work even harder.  Day after day, week after week, year after year, the Israelites toiled to build the warehouses to store the loot from Egypt’s wars, the tribute of empire.  There was no end to the accumulated loot and no end to the Israelites’ labor in service to the gods of Egypt.

For the Israelites, led by Moses out of slavery in Egypt, it was no burden to be told to rest one day each week.  It was sweet freedom.  It was a gift.

It was a gift that made the Jewish people special.  Their pagan neighbors couldn’t understand why or how, on one day of every seven, Jews would do no work.  They would neither buy nor sell.  They wouldn’t work in the fields.  They wouldn’t even cook any food.

Instead, they rested.  They gathered with their friends and families.  They ate cold leftovers.  They drank a little wine.  Not too much, but some!  They took walks.  Not too long and only at a leisurely pace.  The grownups talked and sometimes argued about the Torah, having decided that studying the Torah is never labor, but always a delight.  The kids played games.  They all sang and danced and laughed a lot.  The Sabbath was a gift.

Of course, there is no gift so good that it can’t be spoiled.  The rule-makers, no doubt anxious to protect the Sabbath and keep it holy, made a lot of rules.  How far could you walk on the Sabbath?  Two thousand cubits beyond the city limits.  Could you tend a fire that had already been lit before the Sabbath started?  No.  Can you act to save a human life?  Yes.  Eventually there were thirty-nine different categories of prohibited activities, each with their own rules.  If you add enough rules, even the gift of Sabbath becomes a burden.

So the President of the synagogue, doubtless one of the rule-maker types, had harsh things to say.  But I notice that he didn’t say them to Jesus.  Maybe he was from Iowa where nice people who have a beef with someone are not permitted to say anything.  To them.  They may and do tell other people.  So, the President of synagogue, as a way of rebuking Jesus, told the people that if they wanted to be healed, they should come on other days, but not on the Sabbath.

Jesus replied that anyone who set their ox or donkey free to lead them to fodder and objected to setting a woman free from her sickness was a hypocrite, that is, was “under judgment.”  The Sabbath is all about being set free.  Of course it is lawful to set someone free on the Sabbath.  The rule-makers weren’t pleased, but the crowd was glad to hear what Jesus had to say.  It was good news for them.  It was especially good news for the woman who had been bent over for eighteen years.  Whatever the burdens of her life at least she no longer looked as if she were bearing the weight of the world.

So her story ended well.  Our story?  Well, it’s not done yet, but when it comes to the question of rest, of Sabbath, it’s not looking too good.

Some of you can remember when a Sunday Sabbath was the law.  Stores were closed.  Gas stations were closed.  The pharmacy in our neighborhood was open but the soda fountain in the same store was closed on account of what were called “blue laws.”

We got rid of those laws.  It’s probably just as well.  Sunday may be the day that passes for a Sabbath among Christians, but Christians aren’t the only folks in our country.  It’s inhospitable—as well as illegal—to impose one religion’s practices even on other members of one’s own religion, let alone the members of other religious traditions.  So, I’m not in favor of bringing back blue laws.

But it’s clear that we have a problem with the notion of rest.  Our “days off” are a blur of frenetic activity.  The United States is the only developed country that does not require employers to provide paid vacation.  Even at that over half of American workers don’t use all the vacation days they are allowed, some because they have too much work to do and don’t want it to pile up while they’re gone, others because they don’t have any money to travel and a few because they are afraid it will reflect badly on them.[1]  We aren’t sleeping enough.  Adults need between seven and eight hours of sleep each night.  Half of us are getting less than seven hours a night.[2]  That’s for adults.  School aged kids need between ten and eleven hours, teens between eight and a half and nine and a quarter hours.  So how are you doing?  I’m guessing you’re not getting enough. 

The reasons for our shortage of sleep are numerous, but I believe that many of them come down to this: We aren’t getting enough rest for the same reason that the ancient Israelites weren’t getting enough rest.  The Empire du jour in those days commanded them to work without ceasing.  It set task masters over them. 

Things are different now.  We now deprive ourselves of rest and give it to the tasks we are convinced we need to do.  Collectively, we have been deprived of our ability to say, “Enough!”  We have become our own taskmasters.  We live in Egypt and think that we’re free.  The Empire today has learned to be subtle. 

But the Empire is still with us as it was for the Israelites.  We are bent over like the woman in our story, bent over as if we were carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, bent over and waiting for deliverance.  The Sabbath was a barrier to healing that kept a tortured woman from being set free.  Jesus broke the Sabbath in the name of the Sabbath for her sake, loosened her bonds and set her free.  In the name of the Sabbath Jesus comes to us and offers to set us free from our own bonds, offers to deliver us from the grip of the Empire.  Jesus comes to give us rest.  It will be good to be able to stand up straight.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

 

---

[1] “Vacation? No Thanks, Boss.” CNNMoney. Accessed August 23, 2013. http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/18/news/economy/unused_vacation_days/index.htm.

 

[2] National Sleep Foundation. “Bedroom Poll: Summary of Findings,” November 1, 2010. http://www.sleepfoundation.org/sites/default/files/bedroompoll/NSF_Bedroom_Poll_Report.pdf.