Lefties of the World Unite!

Are you a southpaw? I am. Today, August 13th, is Left-Handers’ Day, our day to celebrate our right to be left-handed.

If you’re like me, you’re happy to be left-handed. It’s just one distinction among many, but I’m glad it’s there.

Although, to be truthful, I go through life not thinking much about my left-handedness except when someone hands me a pin across a desk so I can sign something. Reaching out to grab hold with my left hand always makes for an awkward second or two. And then there’s the bank. My bank has little pen stands fastened on the right, which means I have to reach across and bring the pen over to the left, and then write with the pesky pen cord running across my paper. It’s little annoyances like this that remind me that being left-handed does occasionally make a bit of a difference.

Things Lefties Might Find Difficult

From the  Left-Handers’ Day page, here’s a list of things that left-handers can find difficult. I’m going to go through the list and comment on whether I have trouble with each item. If you’re left-handed, why don’t you do this, too? You can use  the comments here or a post your own blog to tell us the leftie problems you’ve encountered.

1. Crossing other peoples paths/position on pavement.  I don’t think I have more trouble with this than everyone else does, but I’m not sure that I’d know if I did.

2. Hugging. Hmmm…I will have to admit that I’m an awkward social hugger, but I think that’s more because I’m not much into social hugging in the first place. Stand-offishness would describe my usual attitude to touchy things in public. I’d really rather not, but I am making an effort to become better at these kinds of physical displays of affections because they seem to matter a whole lot to some people I like.

3. Taking neighbours drink/bread roll at dining table. This is one mistake I do not make. Hooray for me.

4. Direction of work, decorating/painting rooms. Yep, I do everything from left to right. Painting a room, loading a dishwasher, washing counters or walls. Starting on the right would seem oh-so very wrong.

5. Being helped to put on a jacket. My husband was left-handed, too, so we were perfectly in-sync when it came to these things. That’s why I married him. Being left-handed meant I was the perfect helper (left-hand woman, perhaps?) on his many projects. I knew instinctively which hand would take the tool I was handing, and he used different hands for different tools in a way that would make sense only to another left-hander. Scissors, for instance, force you to use them right-handed or they don’t cut well. And the guards on many power tools are placed for use with the right hand. When my husband and I worked in the kitchen together, we never got in each other’s way, something I can’t say for the times my daughters and I work together in the kitchen.

6. Receiving change. It does confuse people when you hold out your left hand for the coins.

7. Putting children’s socks and shoes on. My kids got used to their parents’ backward ways.

8. Using your left-hand as a point of reference when giving directions. Well yes, always. Does this make a difference?

9. Feeling more comfortable sitting on the left hand side of things. If I can, I always sit on the left side. Being on the right of an auditorium or theatre or church discombobulates me. Is this just a left-handed thing, or do righties feel a sense of unease when they sit on the left side of things?

10. Putting belts on upside down. Huh? There’s a right side up on belts?

11. Visualise things the opposite way around. I’m not sure. What does this mean, exactly?

12. Trouble opening/locking locks. Not that I’ve noticed.
    

13. Work stations flow the opposite way around.  Oooh yes! Since both my husband and I were left-handed, the family computers were always set up tilted for a lefty and with the mouse on the left. It’s another one of those parental quirks the children had to get used to. Right now, on my desk computer, the mouse is on the left and I’ve changed the configuration so that the two sides of the mouse are opposite what they were originally. None of my children has ever grown accustomed to that.

14. Organising files “back to front”.  I’m pretty sure I don’t do this, because if I did, I’d probably know what this means.

Lefties and Hair Whorl Direction

Did you know that one of the things associated with left-handedness is the direction of the hair whorl on the back of your head? Right-handers tend to have clock-wise whorls and left-handers’ whorls tend to turn counter clock-wise. This is not always the case, mind you, but it occurs frequently enough that the correlation has been noted by researchers into left-handedness.

My whorl turns counter-clockwise. And I’ve noticed that I part my hair on the right side, while most side parters part their hair on the left. The right side is where my hair parts naturally and I assume that’s related to my backwards whorl direction. What about you? Do you fit the pattern or not?

Writing Left-Handed

Being left-handed can make writing more complicated. Lefties often write in an awkward (and painfully slow) over-handed way, or make a mess of things by smearing the ink with their hand. Being taught correct left-handed writing technique can prevent some of the leftie problems, but many teachers don’t know how to help little leftie learners. I am thankful that my mother and my first grade teacher both took the time to learn how to teach me to write as a left-hander should.

If you have a left-handed child, here’s a video that will explain some of the problems your left-handed writer might have and show how you can make writing easier for them. 

If you’re a leftie, leave a comment to let me know. If you have lefties in your family, I want to know that, too.  And if you’ve done a leftie post on your own blog, please tell me. 

More Left-Handers’ Day Blog Posts

• Calling All Lefties at Bugs and Bunnies
• Happy Left-Handers Day from Southpaw Jones
• Sinistrality at Nicholas V’s Blog
• International Left-Handers Day at Celebrate Every Day

Theological Term of the Week

 

So many “im” words, so little time.

 

impassibility¹

Used of God, it refers to the teaching that God is “not subject to suffering, pain, or the ebb and flow of involuntary passions.”²

• From the Bible:

  But this I call to mind,
  and therefore I have hope:
  
  The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
  his mercies never come to an end… (Lamentations 3:21-22 ESV)

• From The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, article I:
  

  There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions…”³

• J. I. Packer, in Concise Theology : A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs:

  …God’s feelings are not beyond his control, as ours often are. Theologians express this by saying that God is impassable. They mean not that he is impassive and unfeeling but that what he feels, like what he does, is a matter of his own deliberate, voluntary choice and is included in the unity of his infinite being. God is never our victim in the sense that we make him suffer where he had not first chosen to suffer. Scriptures expressing the reality of God’s emotions (joy, sorrow, anger, delight, love, hate, etc.) abound, however, and it is a great mistake to forget that God feels, though in a way of necessity that transcends a finite being’s experience of emotion.

Learn more:

1.   Paul Helms: Divine Impassibility: Why Is It Suffering? 
2.   Phil Johnson: God Without Mood Swings

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¹ This is a disputed doctrine. Many people object to the idea that God is impassible, but many who object to it don’t really understand what it is exactly that the doctrine of impassiblity teaches. See either of the articles linked under Learn more for more discussion of this.

² I admit it; I stole this definition from Phil Johnson in God Without Mood Swings.

³ We must understand “passions” here to refer to emotions which are drawn out from God involuntarily by something that lies outside of himself.

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Do you have a a theological term you’d like to see featured here as a Theological Term of the Week? If you email it to me, I’ll seriously consider using it, giving you credit for the suggestion and linking back to your blog when I do.

 

Clicking on the Theological Term graphic at the top of this post will take you to a list of all the previous theological terms in alphabetical order. 

The Boxing of God

No, you are not experiencing deja vu. This is a reposting of an oldish piece that I heavily re-edited because there were (and here I begin whispering) serious argument flow issues. Which, of course, you were all too kind to point out to me the first time round.

I have a confession to make: I am a former theology discussion board junkie. You don’t have to be on these discussion boards long before you realize that there are a few standard oft-repeated-but-mostly-meaningless all-purpose rebuttal phrases. The point of these particular counterarguments is to wipe out the opposition with one knock-out punch by making an accusation about the opposing position that is so shocking that those holding it slink away in embarrassment. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one of these scandalous assertions actually work in this way, but lack of success has not kept them from being used again and again.

One of these all-purpose rebuttals is the God in a box argument. This accusation is usually is tossed into a discussion when someone makes a propositional statement about God that doesn’t sit well with another participant in the discussion. But instead of giving reasons this statement about God is wrong, which might require some honest-to-goodness brain work, the person disagreeing simply trots out the customary propositional-statement-about-God objection, “You can’t put God in a box like that.”

Of course, part of the God in a box rebuttal is always right. We can’t put God in a box. God is infinite, so our statements and ideas about him will never contain the whole of who he is.

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