The doctor hadn’t arrived and the contractions were getting more frequent. “Don’t push!” the nurse cried out, then flushed white and ran out of the room in a panic.

It was her first day in the maternity ward and knew only what she was trained for. Contractions were two minutes apart, lasting more than a minute each, and the patient was well over eight centimeters dilated. Ironically, I had read how to deliver a baby in a taxicab in the strange book “The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook” just the night before, never imagining I would actually use that knowledge.

A new nurse rushed in and looked at me. “Are you ready?” she asked. “What?” I questioned what she was asking me to do. “Go get some towels, you’re going to deliver a baby!” As I rushed for a towel, another nurse draped one over my arms. I ran back and gave encouragement to the lady who was already in stirrup position. “You’re doing great!” Honestly, I had no idea how she was doing. A nurse told her to push and just as suddenly I was holding up the head of a newborn. The baby was still half way in her mother until after another push when she suddenly slipped out.

The tiny baby was so slick and slippery I was afraid she would drop out of my hands and onto the hard floor. That’s when the coarse towel suddenly made sense. The doctor came in slamming open the door, still clothed in slacks – had he really been golfing!?

I can’t attest for other cultures, but very few American men will ever have the blessing of delivering their own child. That experience continues to teach, and it’s in that lesson I begin this apologetic. Being born doesn’t happen instantaneously. It takes about twenty minutes to fully deliver a baby. In that event there’s a time when the baby is half in and half out no matter how quickly the delivery takes place. Being born again has similar properties.

Abraham’s rebirth began through faith in God and obedience to Him, but his name wasn’t acquired for 25 years. Through that journey Abram continued to change into a more faithful man. It was this faithfulness that was counted as righteousness, not any acts, but the actions that Abram performed reflected his faith. Moses was 40 when he left Egypt and it wasn’t for another 40 years until God revealed Himself to Moses. Jonah was in the belly of a fish for three days. Saul was blinded for for three days. Even Christ was in the grave three days. From the chrysalis of a caterpillar to a butterfly to the metamorphosis of a tadpole to a frog, these periods of changing from one world into the next are reflected in nature as well. The point is that spiritual rebirth isn’t necessarily a sudden event that one can point a date and time to.

In my case, varying events in life – the drama of death to the elation of new birth, the insight of good friends’ late night conversations and the path in my career – each step draws from me a spiritual response just as much as it requires a mental or emotional one. Only die-hard atheists argue that man isn’t a spiritual being. As such there must be a spiritual realm we walk in parallel to our physical one.

My family attended their first Purim a couple of weeks ago. I’m still reflecting on it with a certain level of interest, clicking through articles on various blogs and Jewish websites.

The lowdown is that everything happens for a reason. If we choose not to risk ourselves for righteousness in whatever circumstance we’re placed into then the end result will still happen, but to our own demise. Our choices both define who we are and are ascertained from our predefined disposition.

The holiday also has several theologically formulated side plots: Good versus Evil, What goes around comes around – specifically that those who live by the sword die by the sword, There is such a thing as universal beauty, Humble obedience to God is often mistaken for human arrogance – but only to those already saturated with arrogance, and Laws can’t be broken but may be trumped by higher laws.

There are so many nuggets of wisdom that come from this holiday that it’s ironic to consider it a fool’s holiday. Shrouded in costumes, groggers, silly pranks, cookies, candy, plays, goofy songs and lots of wine, this holiday is really a beautiful message in masquerade.

Interesting how recent bipartisan attention about the lap-dog behavior of the mainstream media has recently erupted. In high school of all places, one of my instructors, quoting someone I can’t remember, stated that in the near future more people will realize that true news isn’t from newspapers, television, radio, books or schoolrooms. Instead, newsworthy truths will be shared but over podiums in the churches, benches in the locker rooms, cup dispensers near the water coolers and seats in the bars.

People have been boiling over the lies in the main stream media for decades, but have remained quiet. So why the sudden change, now? Perhaps it is because people were promised change, foolishly believed it, ignorantly voted for it, and received a series of events that included politicians gleefully raising tax burdens of the common man to pay for the millionaire bailouts instead … and you can’t tell this same public that our highly intelligent president knew nothing about how the money would be spent. Perhaps it’s because, acting like a good American, we do what we’re told day after day to wake up one day realizing we’re a slave to a national debt that had been building up and hidden – swept away – while the media continued to feed out lies about how great the economy was because we were doing what Americans do (whatever that means).

So it turns out that people are waking up and realizing that main stream media is a lap-dog to the feds, a fat-cat to their advertisers and a circus monkey to the government that sits between the two. The real stories are often ignored from the press while a distracting story is burnished and reprinted with the same degree of accuracy, conjecture and falsehood as a high-school crack dealer trying to convince a jury of his innocence. It makes for a great show, but it makes you sick when you step back and realize how much time and money is wasted over the endeavor.

It’s refreshing to see a generation that was called crazy conspiracy theorists finally get proper exposure – baptist preachers being beaten by executive officers for standing up for his constitutional rights, bloggers being imprisoned for videotaping a police state gone wild, celebrities being called crazy and mocked for telling people that their fears from the pharmaceutical megaliths don’t make them crazy despite what the government and main stream media says publicly.

As taught in grade school political science, any institution given all three of the legislative, executive and judicial power becomes a disease to the world. Even the Bible forbade anyone other than God Himself of being all three, though it was often called by the seats that enacted these powers: priest, king and prophet. I mention this because one country after another has turned into this monsterous disease – it’s a political pandemic. The very media that was supposed to expose these problems failed the public and went so far left that any of their “repentant” attitudes in moving to the right are laughible at best and effigy worthy at least (and how many of us haven’t burned a paper at least once in our life – the only type of “book” burning that is not only common but humanitarian).

Rogue online papers, bloggers and videos are means of information, but every road of information quickly becomes saturated with misinformation so that only those who saw the events unfold personally can determine the truth. These people are fervently preaching, tirelessly running, actively working or jaded and drinking.

Excuse me while I look for the nearest bar…