I’ve started a new thing of late. When I’m out running errands, I turn the radio onto our local talk radio station.  I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to do it but for now, it’s been very educational and enlightening. The Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity programs are often on when I’m out so that’s who I’ve heard the most.  Topics covered include but are not limited to:

• Fake News
• Liberal Media
• Educated Elites
• Leftist
• Socialists
• Obama
• Hillary
• Dems
• Witch Hunt
• Hoax
• Hillary’s emails
• Peter Strzok
• Comey
• Andrew McCabe
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
• Michael Avannati

If you aren’t aware of these terms or people, well, you must not be paying attention because they’re constantly in the news. Between Rush and Sean (Hannity) they are totally obsessed with Democrats and the tale they tell is genuinely from those on the far left. When you listen to their programs they honestly talk more about what they hate about Democrats than what they love about being Republicans. In fairness though, most late night comedian/commentators do the same thing using another forum. To the Republicans there is nothing funny about the leftist socialists out to take away all of their hard-earned money.

Today Hannity was all over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He was warning his listeners about her worldview and  that she was the face of the current Democratic Party. According to Sean, Pelosi and Schumer are terrified of this woman’s far left beliefs.  You would think that he talks to them as often as he does POTUS.  Limbaugh has no love for her either.  They are both equally unimpressed with all but a select few people under 30.

Yesterday, Rush was trying to convince his listeners to believe that there is no such thing as White Privilege because if there were, those who were “half white” like Obama would make much better use of their whiteness and claim that privilege, including President Obama. Not kidding.  It was such a bizarre way to frame it my head was spinning.

Rush spends a fair amount of time talking about the whole Russia Thing. Yesterday he was very strongly educating his audience that it is actually an elaborate hoax created by the FBI to cover up the real collusion between Hillary and the Russians. Gee, doesn’t the FBI have plenty of other work to do?

For now, I’ll keep listening and trying to understand these guys or whoever happens to be on air at the time.  I’ll continue to try know grasp how they took over the party I spent most of my life in. Oh, and I will try hard NOT to shout obscenities while driving along. No guarantees on that one.

Biblical examples abound, especially in the New Testament, of circumstance after circumstance where a challenge of some kind was presented to religious power. There are so many examples that it seems odd that Christian faith is about anything else.  Jesus was always, confronting religious dogma and power.  I honestly cannot think of one example where someone came to Jesus and was told to follow him in order to be exclusively right, morally perfect and most absurdly to take power over nonbelievers because of that rightness. Can you? If you can, please comment and enlighten me.

Consider these verses in the gospel of John. Clearly, as a Jewish man, Jesus was very offended to find his place of worship and giving of sacrifice filled with buyers and sellers. It also seems that the whole idea of the Jewish leaders loving money was a really big deal to Jesus.

 How about these in the gospel of Matthew?

Can it be any clearer? According to biblical authors, Jesus spoke truth to power. I could find several more places where we see Jesus doing things this. There is one about a woman from a place that was “south of the tracks” and unacceptable to his own tribe whom he actually found worth his time and attention. The faithful among his own people wouldn’t have been caught dead with her.

There is an amazing story where Jesus tells  about one of the Pharisee’s heroes (Elijah) who actually couldn’t find anyone among his own tribe interested in receiving what God wanted to do so he left and when to find someone in Syria. He found an old woman starving and miraculously provided food for her without ever mentioning a thing about his own religion. If the physical Jesus looked at the modern forms of those who follow him, I wonder what he would do.  I wonder what he would say.

After nearly 30 years of devout faith* lived within organized evangelical churches, I can honestly say that many of those I knew in them, started out simply as people seeking something  more. Many times, especially among converts, we were broken and fucking up our own lives so badly that we felt it necessary to convert to Jesus or die our own slow death. As newly born again Christians, we couldn’t understand the complacency of so many of the lifelong “Christians”.  Complacency about church attendance, personal devotional time, and sharing the gospel seemed somewhat low priority to many. In the late 70’s Jesus movement, we newbies were sure that real Christianity was serious and devout or nothing at all.

As I look back, I also see that many of us were under the illusion that by our new conversion, we, like Jesus, were speaking truth to powerful religious people. We left our mainline churches in droves and committed our lives to full time Christian service of some kind. We sincerely tried to take the words of Jesus as literally as possible and live accordingly. We gave away our possessions, our time and our money simply because Jesus said to.  In community we saw ourselves as a unit: The Body of Christ on earth, led by male authority.  This was our Christian faith.  This is the faith of many today and thankfully in a free country people can practice as they see fit. It seems obvious that if the entire world this committed, it would seem that all of our problems would be solved, our diseases healed and our existential quests for meaning satisfied. It would seem.

I admire anyone who lives out what they believe with integrity. What I find utterly distressing and beyond my intellectual capacity to understand is that in the 41 years since I embraced this theology, the evangelical church seems to have altered it’s focus to living more by political power than it does living by faith. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for participation in politics by people of faith. What I cannot figure out is how we can live in a religiously free country and expect the entire country to embrace one particular faith.

Jesus didn’t lead his followers to embrace Roman politics.

Jesus didn’t want to legislate morality to the point of controlling others because he knew that the best way to control oneself was through hard core self analysis and interaction with God. He knew that coming to grips with one’s own shortfalls was the only way one could really find ongoing redemption. Ironically this holds true for both believers and nonbelievers. No one makes positive changes in their personal life without intention and hard work. Saying a prayer, joining a church, tithing 10% means literally nothing if one is unwilling to do that. When faith is married to control and power, it is no longer faith but something very, very different. When religion is married to control and power it is even more terrifying and dangerous.

Jesus was said to be the “light that enlightens everyone” at the very least, the first commitment to living a Christian faith would seem to be a devotion to that enlightenment over and above all else. If that time spent in devoted introspection and resulting personal change occurs, I believe that faith is real.  If it is at all about being exclusively right and having authority over others…it simply is not.

*I no longer identify myself as an Evangelical Christian. I still think of myself as a spiritually driven woman but I have more questions than answers. Mental illness in a family member, thought provoking questions I can’t answer from another added to my own very long lasting questions exposed holes in the neatly packaged 4 Spiritual Laws version of the gospel I once took literally. The words of Jesus, as you can tell by this post, continue to be in soul and influence my life every day.

It would seem that one of the great debates of my lifetime has been that of absolute vs. relative truth? Thanks to Rudy Giuliani’s interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press last Sunday, we all get to revisit the concept yet one more time.  I believe the record is pretty clear that the President’s entire campaign and presidency have both been held up by a very intentional and relative grasp of the the truth. Truth is to Trump whatever he deems it to be in the moment. Mr. Giuliani’s words should surprise no one.

Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, is no exception to this idea that the truth is not the truth.  Of course he doesn’t actually realize that he sees truth as relative vs. absolute in most of what he says too.  He seems to have little self-awareness that his truth is as relative to his perspective as anyone’s. In a speech he gave at the National Catholic Prayer breakfast in May, he strongly challenged the audience he was speaking to to fight against moral relativism or the idea that truth is relative.

…Ryan, who is Catholic, lamented at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast what he sees as a deepening sense of “identity politics and tribalism” in the country, as well as a trend of “moral relativism” that is becoming “more and more pervasive.”

Is it just me, or was Speaker Ryan high on something and not able to think clearly?  He doesn’t seem to be aware that what he’s saying actually comes directly from his identity as a Catholic. Being Catholic is being tribal. Being Republican is being tribal. Being German. Being Jewish…um…we are a nation of immigrants and we will see things as true that really are not true for all of us living here.  It seems to me that he genuinely believes that Catholics are exempt from identity politics and tribalism? Is he really saying that in order to stop being morally relative, Catholics should combat culture with Catholic Social Doctrine implying that everyone should adopt it? How is Speaker Ryan’s truth not tribal or relative to being Catholic?

Objective truth is truth. Black is black, white is white etc.  The force of gravity is a truth we cannot deny. We need oxygen to be able to live. This is factual truth. In Giuliani’s situation, he isn’t really talking about whether a conversation did or did not happen because right now it is simply, Trump says one thing, someone else says the opposite. The truth isn’t provable at this point in that situation.

If we’re honest, humans, no matter how confident we think we are in our perception of what is genuinely true,  all too often we are assuming truth simply because it is what we know.  That’s what is meant by truth being relative. Here’s an example. Today Dean was told that he ate his banana the wrong way. He was told that monkey’s hold it with the stem and break off the top. He does the opposite.  The person who told him this is from England and that’s the way it’s done there. Is he right, is it true that there is just one right way to eat a banana? Of course not. It is his perception of reality and it is true for him but it isn’t necessarily the truth.

Enough for today…

A discussion about abortion on Twitter. Same questions. Same arguments. 37 years of advocacy on both sides…I continue to be so frustrated about this but here’s what I said and this blog will be a more lengthy answer to what I meant.

First of all, I don’t really think the author of the first Tweet is truly interested to know what crime (worthy of death) a pre-born baby committed. The author is interested in reminding me that abortion is something that should NEVER happen at ANY time for ANY reason, period. This person knows very well the answer to the question.

I replied by asking what crime a single mother committed? The obvious answer is that she had sex and got pregnant. Instead of focusing on her crime, I suddenly shifted gears and began to talk about the children of a single mother I know who had four unplanned pregnancies. Children with hellish lives, no support, constant shame, (because they were basically feral children who were dirty, underfed and desperately just trying to satisfy their basic needs among themselves). These kids all had a propensity for criminal behavior because Mom was in her room usually behind a locked door so she could watch TV and avoid taking care of them. This mother got the pro-life, anti-abortion message loud and clear. Having a baby became a visit into dreamland for her. She could have been a poster child for the anti-abortion movement. Though she could have easily accessed birth control from Planned Parenthood to prevent her unwanted pregnancies, having a baby was literally no big deal for her. On Medicaid, she paid for nothing. Her baby on Medicaid could get sick, could need extensive medical interventions for free. What Medicaid could not do was help her become a responsible parent. As a committed anti-abortion advocate myself, I really wanted to be proud of her for not terminating her pregnancies. I was not.

The only positive input these children had came from a severely abused older woman and a male pedophile. More than once, these kids were tearing apart the apartment they lived in because they were bored and alone. Hinges taken off the doors, holes put in the walls, windows taken out and the list goes on. As they grew up, Social Services was repeatedly called in to assess the situation and attempt to help the kids. Why they weren’t taken away remains a mystery to me. One of the children has been in and out of behavioral units, taken into a special school and yet when he is discharged or released, he has no idea where to go or what to do and is now in prison. His mother has been virtually held unaccountable for any of the neglect and/or abandonment. I don’t know why that is.  Her situation threw me into a very serious ethical dilemma. These children’s lives are a living nightmare and there is no end in sight. I genuinely wish the children could have been taken away from her after they were born, but that is unethical. I have found myself wishing that for their sakes the mother would have chosen abortion. It would have saved them from the continual disintegration of their lives. When children starve both physically and emotionally, they are a risk to themselves and to those who cross their paths.

Wishing for a better life, a fuller life for these four children has been all that I was capable of doing. She continued to have her parental rights in tact throughout their lives. I know that I cannot ever endorse forced abortions. Knowing this woman, I have serious doubts that she would ever consider abortion for herself either. The entire experience of knowing and being on the edge of this family’s life has made me ask very, very hard questions and made me both prolife and prochoice.

What I wish to say cannot be said in a short tweet. What I wish to say is as follows.

The issue of abortion, though easy for many to find a black and white, all or nothing, either/or issue, is to me anything but that. Though the actual procedures are barbaric to me and I could not have an abortion personally, I have observed that throughout history, abortion has been sought and provided for. I believe that…

• women will seek abortion whether it is legal or not.
• people will perform abortion whether it is legal or not.

Realities like this will exist until the end of human life…

• immoral grandfathers, fathers, brothers and uncles will abuse and impregnate their daughters, sisters and nieces. As a #MeToo woman myself, I will fight my heart out to hold perpetrators accountable any chance I get.
• philanderers will continue to exist and they will use their money, power and physical strength to subdue beautiful women, most often against their will.
• women will most likely be blamed for getting themselves pregnant
• men will walk away unless the law holds them accountable
• pregnancies will exist where pre-born children are in excruciating pain, have gross deformities or serious illnesses that will make life in utero torture as well as impossible to continue after birth.
• pregnancies will exist that threaten the life of the mother.

These issues are reality. I believe that reality must be faced and validated. The choice to terminate any pregnancy should be a most serious and thoughtful one.  If women have the right to choose, like they presently do, there will be women who won’t have any of the above situations in their lives, they will just simply want to end something they don’t feel is right for them. Government cannot control that even if they outlaw abortion. That is reality.  If the abortion issue is focused solely on the life/death of a pre-term child without taking any of these realities into consideration or minimizing their significance, there will be little or no progress for anyone. How we deal with abortion will simply flip from right to left with each new administration.

As a pro-life, anti-abortion woman, with very real thoughts and experiences about all of this and having  been in this fight for 37 years, I have chosen to devote any of my energies toward making unwanted pregnancy a rare occurrence. I strongly support Planned Parenthood because I have been in a clinic assisting someone with acquiring free birth control. It was the ONLY place she could get it and had no reservations about premarital sex. She had been horrifically raped by coworkers in a place where she was the only woman among them. She was already “impure” and if the opportunity for consensual sex arose, she was honest about the fact that she would participate. Most of society, Christian or not, agrees that sex before marriage is no longer unexpected. Like it or not, this is the world we live. Pretending to be Puritans landing at Plymouth Rock will not work. It never has, it never will. I have come to the conclusion that the constant debate over whether or not we can harness and control the women and providers who get and perform abortions is utterly useless.

In the political realm, to imagine that Donald J. Trump has never paid for his wife’s or one of his conquest’s abortions is to have one’s head buried very deep in the sand. Someone who regularly participates in prostitution and regularly pays off his women, the odds are extremely high that he has done so more than once.

In addition to our president’s constant use of prostitutes, I became aware of the reality that when America’s NFL teams come to any town to play football, prostitution requests increase exponentially with the highest being during the Superbowl. Many of these women are actually sex slaves, some in their pre-teens who have been taken against their will. Maybe, if we’re interested in saving the unborn, we should put a lot more volunteer effort in assisting law enforcement in bringing these bastards into jail or forcing them to be castrated. By the way, most back alley abortions are paid for by men who engage in these activities.

In conclusion,  spare me the shallow questions about the unborn. Spare me about how important it is to save the life of an unborn child while you work to cut benefits to pregnant women and their children. Spare me the abstinence instructions when the odds are quite high that you haven’t been abstinent yourself. Put your money and mouth into support of free birth control in schools and at any pregnancy crisis center. Educate your children about the realities of passion and its override of rational thought in the moment. Equip them with the means to protect themselves. Bring the entire issue of sex out of the closet and deal with it. I will continue to make abortions rare by attacking the above issues at the source rather than pretending I can control the women facing their outcome.

It’s no secret that my mental health has been all over the place in the past decade.  Living with Complex PTSD has had a profound impact on my life. One of the realities that I’ve tried to manage over the years has been the various events in my life that trigger the fight, flight or freeze response.  It is as if my entire body is subject to an overwhelming need to be aggressive, to hide away or to just freeze and go numb as soon as I hit something reflective of a past trauma. What has become brutally real to me of late is that my battle with social media, particularly Facebook, is that managing the things that trigger a massive stress response is utterly impossible. I have realized that for my own best interests I simply have to delete my Facebook account. I know that means that I will lose touch with many of my friends and a good portion of my family but I just cannot successfully navigate it anymore. I love the lively political discussions but the very reality that one of the most emotionally triggering things in my life is the inhabitant of the White House and his cronies, I’m honestly a mess when I participate. When sharing what I perceive to be important information, empowerment lasts about a nano second then quickly turns to despair and that just simply isn’t sustainable if I want a healthy life. This is not going to be easy to do but I absolutely need to inhabit my own body with peace, joy and love if I wish to remain here much longer.

Would you please share your snail mail address with me in a Personal Message in the next 24 hours. I love writing letters so you might actually hear from me as the days and weeks go by. If not, at least at Christmas like in the olden days :)!

Namaste, my friends.

In 2002 Dr. Mary Pipher wrote this amazing book about the plethora of refugees who came to Lincoln, Nebraska, beginning in the late 80’s.  At the time, Lincoln’s unemployment was low and so was the cost of living.  The Federal Government’s US Office of Refugee Resettlement took this information and determined that it would be the perfect place to settle a plethora of refugees from around the world. The people of Nebraska had next to no idea they were coming,  had no say as to whether or not they could adequately transition the people and help them assimilate in the Midwest culture and in many cases had no budget for the exponential expenses that the would tax the health, education and welfare systems in the state. In other words, the place was not at all prepared for any of them but they arrived nonetheless. By the time of the book’s publication in 2002, the nonwhite population in the city had grown 128%. In the Lincoln public schools there were children from fifty different nationalities who spoke thirty-two different languages. The J-curve was high for refugees and host state. It was a very difficult and frightening time for everyone involved.

Reading this book humanized the refugee experiences for me but it equally broke my heart. Here are some nuggets that I learned about how “great” it is to resettle in America.

• It is harder for educated refugees who come here.
  • A  pediatrician works stuffing envelopes
  • A director of a hospital drives a taxi
  • A judge works as a janitor.
  • Lawyers become doormen.
  • teachers work in factories
• When a refugee arrives in the US he/she is immediately in debt to the American government for the cost of the plane ticket over here.
• They are given a few months in a small apartment and they are on their own
• They are given a television and told to watch it as much as possible to learn English but instead they learn to believe that Americans are rich and life here is about buying things.
• Due to the low income status of most refugees, they often move into the poorest and most broken down neighborhoods. Many of those in Lincoln ended up in neighborhoods with meth labs, crack houses, sex offenders, and gangs.  Unethical landlords often took advantage of them by overcharging them or not renting to them at all.

Honestly, I could go on and on. Being a refugee in America can be a second kind of hellish existence for those who come here without a support system in place for the long haul. I do not agree one bit with the way that Trump and his minions are handling the immigration system at present but I can say without doubt that the system does need an overhaul. I do not know how we can continue to bring anyone here from war-torn countries without really doing what it takes to resettle them here with integrity. They deserve to have a real chance at a decent life here. I personally believe that forcing any culture to assimilate into another one is a brutal exercise in futility for both cultures.

In my hometown of Norfolk, Nebraska, the two packing plants in the area offered work to refugees coming from many of the same places that they were coming from in Lincoln. All of the sudden there they were and the community was definitely not ready for them. I saw plenty of good people reach out to them but I also saw more abuse toward them I ever imagined possible. I witnessed people from one African country thrown together in an apartment complex. What few in the community understood was that individuals from different warring tribes from within their home country were suddenly expected  to live there in harmony. One does not simply mandate peace simply because the people are on American soil. Local Police officers were often at this complex breaking up fights between them.

Bringing refugees into another country is SERIOUS business and though noble and right to do, it should NEVER be done as haphazardly and without buy in from the people among whom the refugees will be living. Like you, I hate the racism I’m seeing expressed by our president and others in America as much as anyone. It is disgusting. I too want America to be a place of refuge. That said, it is very easy to sit here in my warm house with a nice computer to write my posts on Facebook  crying out in protest against this president (which I will continue to do), to feel the world’s pain and strongly assert that America needs to be devoted to bringing in the broken huddled masses etc.  It is, however, a much more difficult thing for me to participate in the actual process of making sure that these broken, traumatized people have the healthy spaces they need to recover and live better lives in my community.

If this is something we as a nation want to continue to do, changes in how we do it are essential. I am sure that since the writing of Dr. Pipher’s book 16 years ago, things have had to have changed but considering the rhetoric flying around cyberspace,  I’m doubtful the changes have resulted in a better situation for anyone seeking refuge here in this country. There is a lot of resentment out there that could have been avoided had communities been asked to take in refugees in the first place and had they been given adequate time to prepare the places for them to rebuild their lives.  It seems to me that too often they were allowed to enter the US with the appearance of benevolence when in reality they were merely given green cards to provide America with workers willing to do jobs that most of us think are beneath us.

What exactly is abundant life? Christians use these two words to describe the kind of life they will have once they are connected to Jesus. He said he came that we might have life and have that life to the full. Imagery abounds in describing abundant life. The cornucopia  reflective of Thanksgiving, a bowl full of fruit, a big cluster of grapes hanging from a grape vine etc. Rarely does one hold up a picture of plastic jack-o-lantern full of candy to reflect this abundant life from Jesus. Equally rare is a picture of a Land Rover with the caption under it reading, “Abundant life…from following Jesus.” And yet…I wonder how much we believe the latter to be truer than the former?

There is a very weird paradox when it comes to money and possessions intermixed with faith of any persuasion.  The faithful in America couldn’t seem to stop talking about Tim Tebow’s kneeling and praying before and after his football games, about his verbal affirmations to God for his success. These same people were much less inclined to believe that Colin Kapernick’s money was from the same source. His kneeling instead of pledging allegiance to the flag of his country (where he perceives that the police in America are needlessly killing black people for minor things like a traffic stop for a broken tail light on their vehicle) was seen less as a reason to use his “God-given” platform than treason toward the country that “allows” him the privilege of earning so much money.  Something to think about.

Country music stars are often the hard drinking, partying, cheatin good ol boys and girls but they will be the first to acknowledge that God has given them talent and an abundance of blessings. Mansions, yachts and well…abundant life. Contrast that with Emenem and everyone knows that his talent and abundant blessings surely come from Satan himself. Something to think about.

As a continually God oriented person – often in spite of myself – it’s important for me to observe and think more deeply about this. Asking questions of my own life and practice…my own thoughts…I want to know where real abundant life exists, what that abundance really looks like in my life and if it’s exclusive to Christians or not (I already don’t think it is). I want to plant myself in that place of LIFE…the real essence of life.

Religion and Jesus never really did get along too well with each other. Who knows maybe I really am becoming more like he was.  Enough for a Tuesday…I need to get ready for work and the abundance of life at the preschool. AND for that…I am beyond blessed. Namaste, my peeps, namaste.