Not right, not left but both and…

In 2002-03 I was working as a substitute teacher in the public schools in a small town of about 25 K in Northeast Nebraska. While I went from school to school that year I encountered multiple children from the Sudan, Somalia and various parts of Africa. These children were in the local school system because Tyson Foods had hired their parents who had left these war torn areas of the world seeking refuge here in the US to work in the local meat processing plant. 

One reality we in the US must face is that the only way that corporate food giants like Tyson Foods can get workers willing to do that laborious and often dangerous work is to go outside of our borders. If you are from the Midwest like I am, you know that to this very day, the meat processing industry remains one of the largest employers of immigrants. Desperate and traumatized people come from all over the world because these plants open the door for them promising work and subsequent prosperity. 

While I was at work that year, I taught a day in a Special Education classroom. Several students came and went for individualized instruction in math and reading. Most of the students I worked with spoke the bare minimum of conversational English, just enough to be able to learn in an American school. It was a fateful day for me that utterly changed my perspective on the reality of what was actually taking place in our community. As someone who hadn’t been in the public schools prior to that year, I was sobered by the reality that what had been sold to us as a community as a fabulous opportunity and promised economic boom had brought with it a population of desperate and needy people the community was barely prepared for. 

As I went home from that experience I was reminded of a front page feature story was about a fabulous new development coming to our community the year before. The article was full of positivity as it reported on recent city negotiations with Tyson Foods. You know, Tyson. The behemoth meat producer that sells America its chicken nuggets, processed pork and beef in every American grocery store? It is one of several. 

According to our city leaders at the time, an agreement had been made with the company to open a new processing plant in our town. It was sold to the local people as an economic boom that would bring thousands, if not millions of dollars in economic revenue into the local economy. In the finer print it detailed that the agreement included a multi-year tax deferment. In other words, Tyson as a corporation would pay no property tax. Nada. Yes, economic prosperity would come as employees would spend their paychecks in town, but the elephant in the room that no one addressed was that because Tyson paid nothing in property taxes, there would be no extra money going into the local school district. It also did not say that the influx of a few hundred children from the Sudan, Somalia and other African country would require an abundance of resources from that very same school district. 

I taught children that day who barely spoke English, had been through traumatic events from war, some had likely experienced intense hunger and none had pre school health care. No vaccinations, hearing or vision screenings etc. Lovely, lovely children but in great need. After school I was asked to monitored kids being picked by parents. There were so many waiting parents who didn’t speak any English and it was awful not to be able to communicate with them. I witnessed first hand the burden that this particular elementary school staff had when it came to trying to figure out how to communicate to its non-English speaking parents whose children had picked up the bare minimum of the language themselves. The memory of that day of subbing is still so vividly imprinted on my mind. I can still see teacher after teacher, para educators and the principal out on the sidewalks personally handing off the children and attempting to communicate with those parents. It was striking to me that their normal end of school routine had been entirely reorganized to meet these kid’s critical needs. 

I would imagine that in Springfield, Ohio, where the Haitian community has grown exponentially, a very similar reality has landed on the local school district. A reality has also been placed upon all of its public resources. The strain on the community infrastructure has to have become severe. Midwest people are generally good people and I do not believe their push back is entirely about race or country of origin. Any system that has worked for 50,000 people that has suddenly been expected to work for 100,000 (my estimate only) puts everyone involved in a horrible place. It’s often impossible. The reality is that the Federal Government genuinely hasn’t dealt with this reality the way it should be dealt with…at all. Liberals will immediately head to the issue being bigotry and racism and of course, there will be ample example of just those things but they may not even be close to the main thing. The main thing is a system in overload and a populace who by and large had no idea it was coming their way. 

The outcry against immigration is in my mind coming from decades of experiences like those from my home community. I know the people there and I know that they are welcoming and kind people. I know firsthand that these people care deeply about the world and its future. BUT I also know that the immigration issue is not exclusively about racism or white preference. It is about corporations need for workers and their opening doors for immigrants without owning the added responsibilities that come with them. 

I’ve been saying this about Tyson Foods, JB Swift, Armor and other food producers since the day I experienced that small slice of reality in my Nebraska hometown. These companies have been recruiting immigrants from all over Africa and the rest of the world with promises of hope and prosperity for years. When a refugee population is approved for arrival in the US, they will be the first in line asking for the workers. BUT that is all they do. They employ workers. 

The Tyson plant in my home town brought a temporary influx of money into the community but what it cost the community can hardly balance the ledger sheet. The tax deferment ended, the company left town and with it the refugee population too. It’s citizens a bit shell shocked by the entirety of the experience, moved on. 

I believe that the immigration reality is one that will never involve and easy fix. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. The answers are going to be as complex as the issues are. What absolutely has to stop is the reduction of the issues to a binary all or nothing, in or out solution. That approach is increasingly proving to not be at all realistic. 

What the Trump/Vance ticket is doing in addressing the issue they way that they are is as debase and immoral as any human being can get. These two men and their base are more and more obviously made up of Americans who are not at all well informed or of a mind to find solutions that work. They are instead living in some kind of narrow space that keeps them from seeing anything other than they are as real or important. 

We have so much work to do as a country. We have to do that work better. But we will never do it living in a hall of mirrors. It will only happen as reality, whether we like it or not is faced head on. Working across the aisles and outside of our personal comfort zones is the only way to find solutions that are actually possible. 

Two weeks ago I received a phone call from my brother telling me that my Dad wasn’t doing very well. I’m twelve plus hours away by car, two flights away by air. As a result making a decision to go to there house doesn’t come lightly. I prefer taking the time out of my normal life and spending the money to visit them when there isn’t a crisis but that luxury has evaded me for more than a decade. I finally told them that they could not come here for visits because my dad’s medical situation is just too precarious. After this phone call and understanding how my dad was failing, I booked a flight and headed to Nebraska.

I arrived later that evening and it was obvious that my parents were in a world of hurt. Along with his regular difficulty, Dad had fallen twice, was battling a severe UTI and struggling to catch his breath. Mom had been holding things together and they had just put a deposit on an assisted living apartment. I went because I wanted to be with them more than because I thought they needed me to be.

A short time after my arrival I was told that they had changed their minds and would not be going into assisted living. Experiencing my dad’s situation in real time, I was blown away. I wondered how they could not stay with that plan after all they had been through over the past two months especially but also the last five years.

The day after I arrived, we went to the emergency room to get my dad’s newly fallen on ankle x-rayed. I made sure to mention his UTI and the Dr had his urine re-tested. It was still nasty after several weeks of treatment. A new antibiotic was prescribed.

It was just a day or two later and his breathing became more and more labored. His strength more and more lost. Mom made an appointment for him to see his family doctor for the breathing difficulties. I took some time and wrote down on paper all of what I had observed had taken place over the summer and dropped the document off to their family doctor. I have long had permission to speak to him.

We arrived and the doctor took extra care to begin a conversation with my parents about their future. He brought up several realities that had required extra care and wanted them to think about all I bit in light of the coming winter. Dad was not amused. Mom was relieved that some besides her was talking about this. Dad just wanted relief for his breathing not a discussion about long term care.

The doctor listened to his lungs and said that they were clear. He told him to continue with his nebulizer treatments. Dad hadn’t used those for several months and Mom didn’t remember that he even had the machine. The doctor assumed he’d been using them daily since prescribing it.

We got home and sought to get the prescription for the Albuterol at CVS but apparently it was submitted without a specific code for Medicare so it was delayed. Thirty six hours later after my mom making three trips to the pharmacy, he finally had it. Had he been in assisted living it would have been right there for him. He also wouldn’t have stopped using it once he’d started. It was beyond frustrating.

I have observed that in general my dad goes into the doctor’s office with his walker and a plethora of health problems but in his mind, he’s just another healthy guy with a cold. He genuinely thinks that he’s mastered his chronic disease and any other difficulties to the point that his health impacts no one else. In many respects he sees himself as immortal and in equally as many respects, he kind of is.

Dad is an 84 year old man with chronic illness and multiple orthopedic issues but because he lives in 2024 with the means to access any and all treatments available to him, he’s outlived many others in similar situations. Though he has been near the finish line multiple times in the last decade, modern medicine and sheer will combined have only reinforced his confidence that death is for suckers and not him.

I left my parent’s home a week ago. While awaiting my flight from Houston to Austin I received a call from my brother telling me that Dad had been hospitalized. The next day my mom called to tell me about it. As she informed me about the situation she also said that after this he would have to be going into care. He is not.

My dad not only lived through that night in the hospital but after IV fluids and a potassium infusion, he was, in his mind, fully restored. His UTI was abated, the potassium had given him the ability to heal and walk again and seriously, what was all that fuss about? Any and all talk of assisted living from anyone is now fully off the table.

I am home now and processing the reality of what I have just been through. I’m just blown away by the idea that because the crisis has come to an end, all is well. Dad says that he is now fine and there is no need to concern ourselves with him. The proverbial elephant in the room seems to now have taken up permanent residence and time goes on.

Here is where my rant begins. I really hate unaddressed elephants in rooms. I’m not a fan of pretense or denial because both seem to always bite hard in the end. This part of me has nothing to do with the fact that I am female but as of multiple encounters last week you would never know that is the case. When I interacted with the system on behalf of my father, it was a given that I just didn’t get how hard this kind of this was for a man. Said over and over by nurses, doctors and even his physical therapist, my mom and I were continually instructed to realize that his denial, his pretenses and his stubbornness were to be coddled because it was hard for him.

It was crystal clear to me that had I been there for my mom, these same people would have encouraged my Dad, my brother and me to explain to her that assisted living was in her best interest and she would just go. There would be no expectation that her resistance wouldn’t be overruled. The reality of her situation would demand it. The sad thing is really that for women in my mom’s generation this would be normal. They are used to being where they’d rather not be because their husband thinks it best. I think it’s likely going to take generations before this will change.

It’s time for me to once again let go of and surrender my parents to their life and their experiences. I will always love them unconditionally. I’ve realized that my future involvement will be limited or nonexistent from here on out as well.

Last weekend I went to church with my mom. She’s going through some hard things and I knew it would be good for her to be with her people. It was. Somehow I knew that I was at a place of strength in my own life that would allow me to go there and let love rule the day. It felt as if I was in a bubble of grace because even though I encountered many things that in the past would have thrown me under the bus, I was fine. Actually more than fine. 

As we walked inside I was greeted by the husband of a woman I had known years ago when she was in her teens. He asked about my dad and as we shared his about his physical decline, the man said he was sorry to hear it but that he’d been recently thinking about looking forward to “the new body”. His intention was to encourage my mom with the Christian promise, that when Christ returns those who know him will receive perfect new bodies. Dad will get a new one someday. This exchange happened, like so many do in an Evangelical conversation. It’s done with the reinforcement of dopamine’s feel good chemical interaction at the thought of no more pain. Once spoken, we moved on. 

An encounter like this would usually send me into an emotional tailspin because these eternal promises entirely bypass real, present experiences and minimize personal suffering. The person sharing it is allowed to leave the conversation without ever encountering the present, the pain of it, the questions we are all dealing with or any of the actual real struggle of it. It’s all okay because we know Jesus but it’s not anything close to okay in real life. I utterly hate these encounters. But because I grew to experience Jesus as the one who got things, like the woman at the well being assaulted by overly righteous men ready to stone her. Jesus seemed to push through his religions arrogance and forced people around him deal with real life. In this encounter, my friend’s husband bypassed any hint of my parent’s actual pain and instead self soothed with the whole “new body” stuff at my mom’s expense. She decided to be encouraged too and didn’t even notice. 

As we sat down and sang songs about “our” God, I chose to sing too. It was at times a stretch and as I hit lines declaring that “He” is greater…I skipped that and hummed. In my mind I went to the natural world where the streams, rocks and flowers are. There, where I feel the pulse of life’s presence, I sit in God’s too. It was a short worship time and I got through it. Parts I even enjoyed. 

The sermon. Then there was that. I was ready to run…to the bathroom. I never did. I listened as the pastor described a God of love who wanted to bless the sinful,naughty disobedient people. I imagined the prophets warnings as he read them and in my mind’s eye saw the people turning from that and going back to God. The promise of blessing for doing the right thing, for centering life in God…and felt the pastor’s sincerity. I knew he believed it and there’s something healthy about accepting the other who is sincere. I was just fine sitting there with my mom because I was there for her. As she said her “amen”s over and over I didn’t feel the bother I once did. She was soothed by his voice and the message was going to be right whatever he said. 

I greeted many old friends before leaving and enjoyed a few human moments catching up with them. It was good for me. It was just good to be me and experience the humanity of others in their world. 

Later that night as I was drifting off to sleep I realized something about my experience that day. The whole event from getting out of the car and back into it was male. The encounters with others, the worship lyrics, the sermon and the Bible. All male. 

In the 90’s the Southern Baptist Convention went to great lengths to return their church governance to a male headship structure. They took female missionaries off the field. They removed seminary trained female pastors from pulpits all over the US. Dr. Dobson and others praised them for their obedience. It struck me head on that all of what I’d encountered that morning was the result of this decision. It was so clear that the convention has been reshaped and is now male centered. 

The pastor was male. 

The ushers were male. 

The worship leader was male. 

The sermon? 

The words were read exclusively from male prophets. (the Bible has no record of the words female prophets would have spoken)

The promises for God’s people to be blessed were from a male God to a body of men. 

The future, for those possessed by the male savior, would be one ruled by Jesus (male) as monarch. 

Just one female was mentioned the entire service. The one and only woman spoken of was when the pastor sought to expound on God’s grace in forgiving the man who seduced her and then murdered her husband. She was invisible. 

Not one woman in the church spoke. 

Not one. 

I realized that for this body of Christians the Bible itself is male. There is one female. The Bride of Christ living in submission to the man. 

Needless to say, a Southern Baptist or Evangelical Christian, I cannot be. 

I grew up in several places. Most of my time was spent in Nebraska. The last six years of school were spent in Norfolk, a small town in the northeast corner of the state. The first twelve years of my life were spent in Alliance out in the western panhandle. Nebraskans are for the most part Republican. They have deep roots in the land and life revolves around farming whether actively involved or passively living between rows of corn and soybeans, pastures and stockyards filled with black angus or the industrial hog and chicken confinements, agricultural is life here.

Nebraskan’s, like many descended from immigrants who homesteaded here perceive themselves as hard working, independent and entrepreneurial. There is high value placed on community, faith and personal responsibility in Nebraska. It truly is a good place to live and grow up in. At the same time as agriculture has held the root system in place here, there is a dynamic in play that seems to entirely escape most of the people. The reality for every facet of life here is this. Without federal subsidies for agriculture flowing into this state, everything would be very different, everything.

When I am visiting and spend time with people it is clear that almost no one perceives that they are now being and have been for decades, bolstered up by federal money. When a farmer gets his payment in whatever form it comes in, the trickle down is immense. When a farmer has money, everyone does.

The amount invested in rural America’s farmers is meant to empower them and that is exactly what it does. The money coming in at various times and through various programs does not remove the reality that excellence in business management is still required to make a profit and prosper in farming. It also doesn’t mean that the money received is enough to live on it simply means that there is enough to keep going. Americans need to eat and because that is true, most of us agree that these subsidies are necessary. What is just so frustrating for me personally though is that there is such a strong negative outcry among these same people against the federal government.

The rural areas of this country seem to be in utter denial that their very livelihoods exist because millions of us who are living in cities pay federal taxes. If the Conservative Nebraskans I know and love got their declared way, the subsidies to agriculture would have to be on the chopping block in equal proportion to any other cuts. There is no conversation whatsoever about the contribution ag subsidies have to the federal deficit. Not a word.

Successful Nebraskans by and large perceive that they are self made. The reality is that many are just that but with this one exception, the elephant in the room that no one dares to talk about – federal agriculture dollars regularly deposited into the state’s economy. The result is that any inquiry into governance focuses on the use of federal money by the other. As discussions over coffee take flight the single mother, the special needs child, the elder care programs all get called out as government over reach that leads to socialism. With little personal awareness that if the federal money continually going to farmers stops, their own business would dry up and they would be in a world of hurt. It’s so much easier for humans to look to the other and expect them to see their dependence on someone outside of themselves as wrong. It is equally easier to personally justify something we are generally against if that something literally makes our life possible.

I do not think this is a Conservative phenomenon but rather a human one. We are each reluctant to deal with the specs in our own eyes before trying to remove the logs from others. It’s taken no small amount of self reflection on my part and for my husband too to realize this reality in our own lives. We’ve been indirectly involved in agriculture our whole lives and for years took a lot of pride in our pull up your boot straps way of life. All it took was one little question of ourselves when it came to federal money and the dam broke. It was and is incredibly humbling.

I write this to say that if we are going to focus on the other and critically judge their lack of responsibility and inability to be entirely independent and free from any government support, it makes most sense that we are willing to judge our own selves more thoughtfully. Not to see our own connection to an issue when focused on the other does one thing. It erodes our integrity. When what we think and believe does not match what we do and how we live, we are duplicitous and that speaks louder than anything else about us.

https://youtu.be/rf8jlqdg0ao?si=odVLYE8b3owtHG6w

This is absurd. But tons of us believe it. Way too many people are hearing this and not hearing it at the same time. It’s the way it’s been in the Evangelical and Conservative Christian communities for way too long. To hear a man say a thing and just move on as though we believe it when we actually don’t.

At 63 I now live in a N Austin suburb for one reason, to live near my three young grandchildren. We literally left our dream home and life in Utah to be able to be a part of their lives as they grew up. I freely share that with anyone. But when I heard this Weinstein character and JD Vance declare that the purpose and role of the post menopausal female is to be a grandmother, I felt what can only be described as rage. It was visceral for me, meaning my whole body seemed to feel it.

As I have thought about it since first hearing the actual words said in their patriarchal tone, I’ve been trying to understand why it hit so hard and is such a big deal for me. One is that the Vance character is running for Vice President. The other reason are more personal.

In my quest to understand, I have once again been forced to encounter that part of me that has a voice, has thoughts and dreams… you know, my actual human life after it is hit by words from patriarchal voices. Two white Conservative Christian men telling me that because I was born with ovaries, fallopian tubes, a uterus and vagina, I have certain roles and purposes. They assume that the humans born with a penis and testicles are magically given the right to tell me who I am. These two arrogant men get to tell me what my roles in life are, when I can exercise my will, where I can exist in society and how I must do it. Well, excuse my language here but I have no fucks left for men like this or their ideology. If I go to hell when I die, or live outside of their God’s favor as a result, then so be it. The hard fact is that this paradigm of patriarchy is utterly dehumanizing. It dehumanizes the men who believe it and it destroys the women who bow down to it.

My purpose in life is the one I have chosen for myself. It is to be the best human being I can be.

It is to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.

It is to be a good neighbor and love my neighbor as myself.

It is to speak the truth with as much love as possible.

It is to remove the logs from my own eyes before trying to remove the specks in others.

I am here in the sweltering August heat of central Texas because my husband and I both want to be near our grandchildren as they grow up. Did our relocation fit my purpose as a human? Yes. Did it provide for that post menopausal role to be fulfilled for me? NO!

My role as a grandmother is a byproduct of my life. It’s one that came to me unexpectedly. My four grandchildren are not biologically linked to me. I did not expect either of my adult children to make my life meaningful by having children. How horrible to place that on them for my worth. How awful for children to have to meet that expectation. I also chose not expect my sole purpose to be found in the role of wife, mother or parent, even as an Evangelical Christian.

I personally believe that there is nothing as soul deadening as there is when a system so specifically defines the purpose and role of the humans within it. I believe this primarily because deep in that system my own life called me out of it.

I taught Christian school when the system said it was best for women to be home.

I sought mental healthcare for my daughter when the system fought me.

I spoke up in meetings when men told me to be quiet.

I demanded equal pay for equal work when the system decided I didn’t need it because I was married.

I’m so seriously done with this nonsense and you know what? Christian women are too! Most don’t adhere to it in their real lives anyway. JD Vance and Sam Weinstein are punk kids caught up in narcissistic spirituality that makes them feel worthy to be here. They seem to know little about Jesus and his treatment of women. Now under Trump’s thumb, his life is going to be slowly eaten up and ruined. There’s no room on Trump’s stage for anyone else. Think of Mike Pence and his rigid world view. No one even thinks of him anymore.

I will move on like always. But never without a struggle. It took forever to break out of the patriarchal grip and realize my value exists in my being alive in the first place. It took a long time to see my purpose as making that life a good one for myself and others instead of making a system work because God demanded it.

I was awake at three am last night and found myself reading an article about January 6th participants and how the resulting criminal prosecution has ruined their lives.

I read about a young man who went to DC as a patriot caught up in Trump’s machismo. His take is that he wanted to see the monuments in real life and actually participate in a Trump Rally in person. Those testifying for him asked the judge for mercy saying that because he grew up without a father and had a rough life he just didn’t know what he was doing was actually illegal. It wasn’t his intent to hurt anyone or break the law.

When sentencing him, the judge involved said that it was evident that he was living in an alternative reality that thus far was unable to be pierced through. In spite of clear evidence that he committed serious crimes, he showed no understanding at all that he had done anything wrong. And if that wasn’t sad enough Trump’s spoken directly to him since and promised a pardon should he be re-elected. This man no longer has a self apart from a connection to Trump. The psychological ability to think outside of the paradigm that Trump is king and his personal suffering is for the king, now exists in his brain as cement. His life is virtually over.

Think about this with me.

This grown man from rural Texas completely lacked the understanding that a government building was not a public place he could freely walk into on behalf of the President’s instructions from social media. When the doors to capitol were locked it mattered little because Trump had mandated the action.

The reality is that as POTUS Donald Trump knew exactly what he was asking them to do. He wanted them to do something immoral and illegal because it served his narcissistic purposes. The sacrificing of a young man’s life was entirely irrelevant. It is still entirely irrelevant but the victim only knows Trump thinks he’s special and needs him.

When confronted with locked doors and armed guards, he and many others went forward undaunted because they believed themselves to be empowered to ignore them. Years of subcultural conditioning from this man’s alternative universe shaped him into someone who would take action when Trump spoke.

What is most disturbing in all of this is that this powerful psychological connection reflected in this one man’s story, equals the reality of ANY conservative American still planning on voting for him. That is not exaggeration. This man is more dangerous than any man in this country.

He has literally been grooming the US populace since first building Trump Tower in NYC. He then manipulated the system to get a 30 year tax deferment. The world of high fliers around him in the 70’s quite literally blown away by his savvy. They lusted after his power for themselves – power to skillfully screw other people over for one’s personal benefit. Cloaked in lavishness, he twisted the narrative to arrive as the businessman’s hero. He was perceived as brilliant because he found way after way to never pay taxes and control the social scene in the city. He quite literally created the perception that government is the enemy of the people unless he is in control of that government.

Donald Trump has never known a situation or been involved in anything where the final power of a law or a system of government has any control over him. As POTUS he went through staff unwilling to do his bidding the entire four years. Project 2025 is the far right’s answer but in t reality, he’s likely to tell them to go to hell if elected and appoint guys like Mike Lindell to a cabinet position.

Trump knows that we comprehend the world as we are and that he must align with others at that place first. He gets along with people of all sorts until they discover his real person and then just like that, they disappear. I don’t know if there’s anything he can do that will persuade the hard core Conservatives I know to grasp that they too are under his influence in the same way the January 6 people are. If they vote for him, they think they are voting for Conservative values and ideals but they really aren’t. He’s done his sick magic and unless there are enough of us who are yet to be under the spell, he could win again.

It makes no rational sense at face value. But pathological narcissists know that and that’s their super power. This election is going to be fraught with turmoil because he will not leave it alone until he can no longer speak and even then, I will bet he will find a way to control if he can.

It’s really this bad.

I find faith very hard to cling for many reasons but most especially when I hear someone claim to be so special that God moved the trajectory of a bullet aimed right at their head to keep them alive while someone close to them died. At the same time, when I heard this sentiment from Trump’s lips I was reminded once again of just how close the tie between Evangelical certainty and pathological narcissism actually is.

As I look back over the years of my experience with God and faith in a favorable force of love in the world, I cannot help but grasp that I too spent years living life as a spiritual narcissist. I know the term sounds extreme, but once you see a thing, you can never unsee it. From the day I came to a personal faith in Christ, it was a given that, I chose, I found, I was loved, I had a plan from God to follow. As a result, quite unaware of it, I was being schooled in narcissism and everything around me strengthened it. I now have a very difficult time seeing religion as anything but a journey of narcissistic devotion that has led us to this place in our collective American history.

It’s ironic because Jesus was particularly upset by religious narcissists. I think it’s why he told his followers to give in secret and to pray in secret. Knowing God and living life in response was not contingent on secular affirmation. Today’s Evangelical not only responds almost solely to secular approval it seems to crave it. No place is this more evidentiary than it is in the worship of Donald Trump by the Evangelical Church.

It’s a broad and wide tent encompassing charismatic Christians, Southern Baptists, hardline dispensational fundamentalist and all kinds of offshoots. In every way Donald Trump’s pathological narcissism has been the great unifier of the Evangelical movement. His pathology was fertile soil for insecure and frightened Evangelicals in a world moving at light speed especially the elderly and most especially those with a lot of money.

As a complete outlier, almost entirely unknown by the average Christian, Trump came on the scene and they were led to embrace him. After first abhorring his personality and behavior, they were soon led to imagine that he was some kind of redeemed reprobate and would lead them into the promised land. I watched as believer after believer bought in. It was incredible to me that he would become the “pro-life” candidate, the chosen of God candidate and the list goes on.

This post is about politics because sadly, that is what faith has become, political. As a result it has accomplished one thing…the exposure of the narcissistic nature of American religion. It is about our collective imaging that we are better than others because we are exclusively right.

The hard core truth is that Evangelical Christians have lost their first love. Donald Trump was simply very lucky. God did not save him because he’s anointed and special. Evangelicals are going to either take over like the forces described in The Handmaid’s Tale or they are going to actually see God and experience a holy breakdown.

That would change the world.

Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace:

1)The U.S. must “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

Sounds great at face value. It’s not.

As a strong supporter of children, moms, dads and a rescuer of pets…those who know me say that I live to LOVE and encourage people. The thing is that doing the things I learned from Jesus in America has meant that I’ve encountered many families over the years. And guess what?! There have been a plethora of different family structures among them all. I don’t know anyone who actually believes that there can ever be a one size fits all definition of a family that describes every group of people that makes up one. Most importantly, a government defining a family as one male married to one female and having as many children as possible, means that any slight variation of this model will be subject to punishment from the government. If not directly, by exclusion.

Birth control…over.

Single parent supports…over

It will be their way or nothing. That is not liberty. That is not freedom. Think about anyone you know who varies even slightly from the Leave it to Beaver model…your family?

2)Project 2025 will seek to…Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. So what does this mean?

Do you like to travel from place to place on good roads and over safe bridges? Well in a purely “self governed” state, road maintenance will be up to you. Snow removal? Yours.

Like to ability to call 911? Gone.

Like to know your doctors and lawyers actually have an education required by law? No more.

Public Libraries? Government chosen books.

Project 2025 seeks to…

3)Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”

Seriously? Think this means keeping you safe so you can enjoy the fireworks every year?

What global threats hit you upside the head this weekend? The actual ones?

Oh and I’m pretty sure the borders of this county are protected by the “administrative”state and with it being dismantled, what’s a nation to do? Bombs?

Project 2025 seeks to…

4) Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”

Where do you NOT get to live your actual life freely? Prison. That’s the only place. The last time my husband traveled for work he was in Michigan where the Amish were out and about snarling up traffic. Annoying as ever but guess what? Everyone tolerated them…because? In America they are free to be Amish?

There Heritage foundation would like you to think that you are living in the worst country on earth. Change, growth and the realities of life on an ever expanding populace, in their minds must be controlled. Ask yourself, just where is my personal liberty and freedom being restricted?

I was just on an airplane and wonder if someone was feeling restricted as they were unable to smoke next to me because the administrative state said they no longer could. I like my freedom to breathe clean air especially in a metal tube flying hundreds of miles an hour at 30+K feet, don’t you? Kind of like it that it also requires pilots to actually know how to fly.

This foundation’s plan is not about freedom or liberty. It is about control. Frustrated that the administrative state literally saved us from the psychopath that is DT, they have pull up all stakes and are planning to reshape the country in their image. Planning to put this in place with a rubber stamp from 45, guys like Steve Bannon, Steven Miller and Roger Stone imagine that they will be in charge. Christianity is the mask they are wearing to make their over reach palatable to the masses. Though non of these men have traditional families themselves – consider the former POTUS, by pretending to be aligned with the Christian right, they think they can win.

Project 2025 is exclusively about one specific type of people- white, Christian American people. It is my observation that way too many of these people have entirely lost the connection with their dark-skinned, Jewish born, non-married and childless Lord and Savior, Jesus! Having made him in their own red, white and blue image, it appears that they are faithful Christians seeking Gods best, but are instead quite the opposite. It is clearer by the day that The Heritage Foundation’s work is nothing more than a gross attempt to deny reality and craft a world of its own making at the expense of the rest of us.

Project 2025 is an arrogant attempt to take this country away from the rest of us. It is not authentic in Christian faith and its doctrines in any possible way but sadly, too many Christians have no idea what their faith’s tenants actually are anymore.

That Jesus said so many things contrary to this effort, seems to entirely escape way too many believers. They have exchanged time in prayer, Bible Study and most of all personal transformation toward Christlikeness for idolatrous images like the 1950’s post war image of a perfect American family, state and nation – one where everyone is a Christian churchgoer. Jesus challenged people like this all of the time. He looked them in the eyes and called out their misguided allegiances. He was especially adept at seeing hypocrisy in religious people. It’s my own observation and opinion that because he was relentless in this confrontation, he was eventually crucified.

Real Christian faith has nothing to do with forcing people to behave a certain way. The Christianity I know is a relationship with a risen Jesus and expressed by those who choose to follow him, period. It is not the Bible. It is not American churches. But most of all? It is not the United States government.

I have been thinking a lot about resilience and the ability to move ahead when the life we experience in front of us is full of things we have no control over. We are conceived and born under circumstances we have no control over and all of us are subject to the force of life that ignites us in the first place. We have no choice as to whether we breathe or whether our hearts even beat. It’s all up to something already in motion and I’ve come to the conclusion that what is in us is strength. All of us are strong. 

I am in Minnesota in hotel room not far from my adult daughter’s hospital room. In some ways it’s familiar territory for us to navigate and in others it’s entirely different. She was born at 28 weeks and spent months in the NICU in 1986. The times we’ve been in a situation like this one are too numerous to count. About a month into her stay at the NICU her colon started to die and she had to have part of it removed. She is in the hospital today, 37 years later as a result of that day…which was a result of being born 12 weeks early…which was a result of my water breaking at 13 weeks. Her world turned upside down when I was moving into my fourth month of pregnancy and with a less than one percent chance of survival, she made it to viability. 

The thing I am realizing as I sit here writing this, is that for the world around us, success and strength are measured by how much money can be deposited in our personal portfolios, the size of home we can own, the luxury cars we can drive and places we can visit. This year Travis Kielce and Taylor Swift are the power couple because individually they have achieved success like very few ever have. Both are incredible and so very strong. But here is what I know. The strength that has led to their success doesn’t hold a candle to what I have witnessed in 37 years of being Hannah’s mother. Her strength equals and then surpasses it. My daughter, has a force of life inside of her that I sincerely do not understand. She is so very strong. 

Yesterday, when I was walking back to the hospital from a restaurant, I walked by a young man sitting on a stoop, sign in hand asking for help. I wanted to walk the other way and chose to ignore him because I had nothing to offer him. All I had was my phone and he clearly wasn’t capable of taking ApplePay. But as I write this, I’m thinking about how strong he actually was sitting there and asking for help. He has clearly been through things and is somehow still here. Confused, broken and lost but still trying. The inner strength one must possess to be in such a circumstance and still keep trying has to be from somewhere deep inside. 

I’m thinking today about the incredible doctors and nurses who have cared for Hannah so far. They have spent hours and hours studying, spent oodles of money and sacrificed so much to be able to do a job that saved her life. The surgeons worked through the night that first night and again the next day, tag teaming so as to make sure they were alert and able to do it. Add to that the reality that this entire place was a hot bed of illness during the pandemic and these very docs were all there. What keeps them going? It cannot be just the money or the prestige. 

In summary,

It is human to be strong,

To be alive is to be strong. 

In our weakest states…

We are all of us, strong. 

In a recent Fox News interview our former President asserted that the people who hold him accountable are just evil. He went on to assert that the American people will at some point reach a breaking point. What an incredible tell.

Growing up with his father Fred, Donald was never allowed to even come close to breaking. Always his father’s favorite, his golden child. While ambivalent or almost entirely negligent toward the rest of his family, Fred Trump was overly attached to and grossly indulgent of Donald. He coddled him from the beginning and virtually removed any and all consequences of his actions from him. He saw in his son what he wanted to see and not the action he had done or its effect on anyone around him.

Fred Trump was entirely codependent on his son and focused on making him in his own image. In that vein he protected Donald from ever reaching any kind of breaking point. If he misbehaved, it was always the fault of someone else. The nanny, a sibling, another student and even Fred himself, but never Donald. As a result, the man almost never experienced a moment of sorrow that led to contrition or regret. Fred would simply not allow it. By 2016, the adult Donald, the man who ran for POTUS, was virtually unknown by the party that nominated him. Most painfully of all, he was entirely unknown by the most religious among the party and as a result they were some of the most vulnerable within it.

Think about the advent of the Billy Bush tapes when we heard him in his own words express glee at groping women’s genitalia. As many were shocked, he spun it as embellished by the media. By the time this part of him was exposed to the masses it was so late in the race that Hillary was the only alternative. The far right hated no one as much as her and he fed off that. Most could not grasp that what they thought they saw in her, was similar to a match in comparison to a bonfire.

I believe with every fiber of my being that the average person finds it impossible to fathom that another human being could be so utterly detached from life itself. The reality is that Donald Trump was raised without ever learning to see himself in the context of mankind, as one among many. He was taught to live his life attached to others solely for the benefit of what they could bring to him and for him. Heathy people have supportive networks, pathologically ill people have a body of enablers that they cannot ever be without. Most pathological narcissists have few friends because they cannot have reciprocal relationships. The more extreme the pathology, the more true this is. Trump literally has no one but himself most of the time. He is surrounded by people but virtually always alone.

The result of this sad man’s life is that the only breaking point he is capable of being familiar with is the one he inflicts on others. His suggestion that there will come a breaking point with those persecuting him and/or America’s tolerance of how he is treated, is solely with the expectation that when we as a country reach it, it will break in his favor and this is what he is counting on. Everything in his life up to now has reinforced for him that he can self indulge for life because anyone who opposes that indulgence will finally break, leave him alone (which he will feel no loss from) and he can move on as he wants to. It is all he knows.

Being a convicted felon hasn’t sunk in yet because he has no experience with anything sticking. He has endured two divorces, multiple bankruptcies and constant humiliation but like water on a well-oiled ducks back, none of it touches him personally. He still lives like a king and has suffered nothing but a bit of shame. He doesn’t feel shame so whatever happens is spun to illicit more sympathy and money from his followers. The only thing that can stop him is our justice system and he because he knows that he was hell bent on stacking the courts. He knows that he has to win the White House back from Sleepy Joe because if he doesn’t, the accountability train, though delayed is on the tracks and it will break him if it’s not stopped. He is 100% certain he and his enablers will stop it in November. He doesn’t grasp that he has been charged, found guilty and faces sentencing because he believes he’ll get off with a slap of the wrist. He always has.

We have to see him as he is. He is not as a Republican. Not is not a Christian. He’s not a husband in real life. He’s not a family man. He’s a mob boss with no friends, only conquests.

The bottom line is that his only goal is to break us.

.

Here in Central Texas it seems that many believe America would be a great country to live in if we’d just return to its foundational principles – aka the Bible. On my Nebraska hometown paper’s web page last week, this header appeared.

I have been asking myself what I think about this since.

First, it makes me so sad to imagine that there are still so many people in America who actually believe that America is founded on “biblical principles”. Any paradigm of thought that this is true is simply not backed up by America’s historical documents. It is true that the Bible influenced many of the founding fathers personally, but that hardly translates into a nation founded on those Biblical principles.

The US Constitution guarantees that there will be no establishment of a national religion but many are working diligently to change that. Though the only way legally possible way to make this a reality is to propose a new Amendment to the Constitution. Since that matters little to many a preacher influenced by its plethora of faux historians like David Barton, there is no serious effort to do that. Instead, under a huge umbrella of thought they call Biblical principles, what these Christians really want is to heal a world around them through the imposition of Christian mandates within governmental structures. Participation and belief have become irrelevant in this quest for Christian Nationalism. It is as if they believe that God is more apt to protect places where a state declares its nationalized belief on public lands and buildings or something. One example of this being done here where I live is how vital it is has been to pass legislation that requires public schools to display signs that say, “In God we trust.” I just laugh now when I see that sign as I pick up my grandsons at school alongside the Hindu and Muslim parents there. I am certain that those behind this effort think of it as a positive witness but everyone knows that it means only the Christian God.

The Texas legislature is very literally now an Evangelical legislature. This has taken place bit by bit but has most of all been the result of Christian oil barron, Tim Dunn in west Texas. He genuinely owns them. Last year, the TX Legislature chose not to impeach AG Ken Paxton solely because Tim Dunn told 12 of his state senators that he would stop contributions to their campaigns if they voted in favor of impeachment. The evidence was clear but the money mattered more. I find the narrative of making any return to biblical values quite hollow now that I’ve experienced the actions of Christians here who imagine themselves to be exercising them through state government. This is one of hundreds of examples of these so called founding principles in action.

There is no question that the Bible was an important book to many Americans from the moment that first shoe stepped on Plymouth Rock but the founding fathers themselves were by and large intellectual giants with a worldview that also included familiarity with Greek and Roman philosophies. The Enlightenment period authors were also of influence to these well read men. There was no one set of principles used to establish this country.

It is vital for each of us to remember that the American government established after the Revolutionary War was done so in direct opposition to the Christian monarchy it had been ruled by prior to the war. The very fact that the British believed the King to be anointed by God and that they were responsible to obey that king was exactly what the colonists went to war over. It was their supreme motivation to establish a country without a central religion and without one man in control as king.

I would ask those who are asking the question in the image above to consider this. America is only ever as ill as its people are. It is only ever as dysfunctional or divided as its people are. The founders set it up that way.

It is necessary for us to realize that because something bothers one of us individually, that doesn’t mean that it is a sign of ill health in my country. Change is hard. With a world growing at light speed, it is taking all we have within us to adapt to life. The strength of this country thus far has been in the profound soundness of its structure. The solution to what we find stressful living in a democratic republic is not to return our country to some undefinable set of founding principles we imagine to be forgotten. It is to instead embrace the gift that our founders gave us. It to recognize the strength of every citizen in the outcome of the whole. By all means if you can personally grow to value the words of Jesus and especially his sermon on the Mount, do it. The beautiful reality is that here you actually can!! The truth is this. We get to live as we do because we actually are living the foundational principles our founding fathers gave us from the very best of themselves. Every single day.

I am someone who once viewed herself as a lost sinner separated from God. I was 16 and felt utterly incapable of making a life for myself that did not include surrender to the vices of my culture. I didn’t want to have sex. I wanted to be loved. I didn’t want to drink or do drugs. I wanted to belong. I also wanted a way to be of use to mankind. Everything I wanted seemed to find a home in the Southern Baptist denomination.

Joining the Baptist faith was everything I ever hoped it could be and more. It was a safe, nurturing and wholesome place for a 16 year old to plant her life into. I loved being at church or in Bible study. I loved living within the pale of a God who loved me unconditionally and sought only for my growth in becoming like his son Jesus Christ. Each and every day I was encouraged to look at my life and the life of Jesus with the one goal of merging the two. It was expected that as I grew in Christ my life would be increasingly marked by the fruit of the Spirit.

Becoming an Evangelical Christian gave me the path toward my own self discovery. It became clear to me almost from the very beginning that the qualities Paul wrote about wouldn’t magically appear simply because I had made the transaction and asked Christ into my life. The apostle clearly said that these qualities were the fruit of the Spirit at work in me. The Spirit isn’t a fairy god mother sprinkling its wand and poof I am able to find love when all I want to do is hate. Instead, the Holy Spirit is the light in my real lived experience that shows me the part of me that is unkind and how to become the opposite. It is the force that challenges me when I’ve been overly judgy toward the homeless person I see at the intersection and says hand the guy the five dollar bill in your purse and don’t tell anyone. In other words to know life in the Spirit of God requires that we are self aware and able to look at our own thoughts and behaviors in the light. It requires that we grasp what is true at a given moment in our very life at that moment and if it needs altered then it is done. One decision at a time as we are led by the Spirit and our best self we can and do change. It is just reality that there is no other path toward spiritual growth in the Christian faith. No self actualization. No spiritual actualization. It’s that simple.

My perpetual grief exists in the realization the Evangelical voices being heard in 2024 are focused on obtaining positions of power and control while simultaneously creating laws in government to control people who are entirely uninterested in their worldview. The Evangelical church is no longer focused on the human experience of personal growth and change. Maybe it never was and I just thought that is what it was about. Regardless, I believe that there will be serious consequences as the quest for power and control of those outside their faith continues because first off, it is not at all reflective of Jesus.

I watched a video on YouTube yesterday where a high school or college age woman was sharing about her discovery that Taylor Swift just might really be a witch. It’s standard practice for those who don’t have power and control in equal measure to assume that anyone who does must be getting it from the dark side. As I read the comments under that video I just shook my head because each one was focused on affirming this woman for standing up for righteousness and being willing to be persecuted as though this was an accurate assessment. For actual fact, history has a long track record of labeling strong women as witches because patriarchal forces are always threatened by strong women. We have no stories of men being hanged as witches, do we?

Self focus is hard work. Self judgment and self criticism – though painful – are both vitally necessary in order to gain self discovery. In my experience to become Christlike at its core is to engage in the truth first and foremost about one’s self. It is only when we can do that, that we are able to realize how to grow and change. Even if you believe that we’ve been born again and redeemed for eternity, while you remain here on earth you will remain excruciatingly human. The only thing that can change you, me and humanity in general is self discovery and reflection. The only thing.

I commented on the YouTube video and simply said, “You people need to examine yourselves and leave her alone.”

That may sound harsh but it is just the truth. Evangelicals need to return to the basics and let go of trying to control the world by imposing Christian rule upon it. Fruit always comes from healthy plants and trees. Humans can never force them to give it to us. Why do we expect that positions of power and control of others will do the same?

I was yesterday years old when I learned about this reality. I was listening to a Bulwark podcast with Tim Miller and a guest talking about former Attorney General Bill Barr’s recent endorsement of Trump. It honestly makes zero sense at face value because Barr has been very outspoken since his time as Attorney General about the very real danger Trump poses to the country.

He has declared with utmost certainty that he’s unstable, irrational and very dangerous. Many of us were shaking our head’s wondering what kind of dementia Barr has developed in order to do the 180 and determine so absolutely that our country’s future would be better left in the hand’s of a psychopath than as it would be with Joe Biden in office. I know, I know, it turns out there a whole lot of folks out there in agreement with him and sadly, I know and love many, many of them.

As Tim Miller played a clip of Barr now saying out loud that a vote for Trump would be saving the country and a vote for Biden, it’s ruin, I was like a steel clinging to a magnet. The question of our time, of my lifetime anyway, especially since 2015, has been what core belief system could be so deeply rooted and strong that it would be able to overwhelm the obvious experiences of a human being’s five senses and flip a switch to where all would be ignored in favor of a very dangerous pathological narcissist with a lengthy record of behavior to prove it behind him? What is it??? Ego? Identity? Religion? I would like to stop having to ask this question but it just doesn’t go away. I think I may have landed on the bottom line answer thanks to Bill Barr and his reply. He has exposed the very real core of it all and it is summed up in his allegiance to his allegiance to the Anglosphere, Five Eyes worldview, one I didn’t even realize existed. In the following quote he refers to the loss of America’s freedoms if Biden is elected.

“They’re (our freedoms) being constrained by the progressive government. And democracy, especially in you know, from the Anglosphere democracies, the Five Eyes and so forth.The threat’s never been for autocratic government on the right.”

It turns out that the world’s governmental intelligence has been led by the five nations (5 Eyes) considered to have the right perspective on how things work best in the world. Grounded in the realities of Anglo driven colonialism where nonwhite, nonChristian countries were taken over by force and their resources usurped for the Empire, the post colonial countries have provided the means to continue to control the world through its cohesion of resources. In other words this is the way the world is still ordered in the mind of Bill Barr and honestly, many millions of sincere Conservatives. Deeply rooted in the belief that the Anglo American perspective IS the right one not only in America but the world over, Barr and those like him literally and absolutely hold to the perspective that should Trump not be elected, America will be destroyed. Think about that.

It is not the economy.

It is not abortion.

It is not the environment.

It is nothing but the belief that

WHITE

CHRISTIANS

are the only humans worthy of the world.

This core belief is so deep and so strong that these people do not even recognize it as it really is. Bill Barr and others are willing to subject our nation’s rule (not leadership) to a man without a conscience, a soul, and entirely given over to his own self as god in order to keep us rich, white and Christian.

I’ll be damned.

It has occurred to me that the hype around Donald Trump has diminished exponentially here in Nebraska. I am still pretty certain that if the election were to be held today there would still be a majority of those who would vote for him. When the alternative is a Democrat, Trump will still get their vote. He really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and that would not impact many a devout Republican.

What has changed since 2016 and 2020 is evidenced in the lack of visible evidence that Trump is running. As I drove up here from Omaha on Sunday I didn’t see even one Trump 2024 sign. Not one. The fields and small towns once littered with MAGA signage were empty. It was incredibly different 8 and 4 years ago.

The promotional political focus here seems to have shifted to the local mayoral election here in my home town, state legislative candidates and the US Senate race. Really, if I didn’t know it, I wouldn’t think we were actually voting for POTUS this year. And what else has occurred to me is that as we have eaten out in restaurants, I have seen just one Trump 2024 hat and heard virtually NO ONE talking about him or Joe Biden. This is not the Nebraska I grew up in during an election year.

This reality is not good for Trump. And sadly, this reality is also not good for Nebraska OR America either. It’s as though the average Nebraska Republican is shell shocked and numb. I don’t think the former POTUS being on trial has all that much to do with this reality. It seems to me that hitching the wagon to Trump has simply exhausted the Republican Party. Add to that the theatrics in Congress this last year and the lack of cohesion with no official platform to support and it’s as if no one cares anymore.

The strong Republicans who knew what it would take to govern and those that understood our Constitution remain but perhaps they are in mourning as a result of the takeover by the theatrical and substance-less. Still strong in their beliefs, Mitt Romney, Lynne Cheney and Adam Kinzinger continue to speak out and attempt to re-educate the party but they too have realized that the party has been swallowed whole by the greatest fish in the sea.

Like in the biblical story of Jonah, the GOP is stuck in its pathological narcissist’s belly. Unlike Jonah, who repented and promised God he would do what he needed to, the GOP continues to be consumed by the reality of life in relationship with a pathological narcissist. Ask any person in a marriage with someone as ill as this man is and, if they are still alive, they will tell you that it is first crazy making and then if you escape before you are nearly killed, you will spend the rest of your life recovering from the damage done to your soul.

Trump is going to always be connected to millions but as is typical for someone like him, the connections are hairlike and easily broken. In the same way his wives and children have disappeared from his presence on the campaign trail and now in court, the rest of his people are slowly doing the same. The real and lived world of the narcissist is a very lonely one.

It is very likely that as Trump’s MAGA people busy themselves with their own lives and ignore his, we can sincerely expect that the man’s behavior is going to take on entirely new dimensions of rage induced sleaze. The judge’s gag order is going to get him banned from the room and in a jail cell. I don’t see any other path in front of him because he is so ill. He cannot submit to anyone but his own self. I am in full expectation that this will get really ugly. I mean really ugly. It’s a certainty when confronting a narcissist with proof of his bad behavior in a public setting.

I will be happy to be proven wrong. Sort of.

My Dad was reading a book tonight and when he described it to me I was thinking it sounded like something I might enjoy. He said that he bought it because the author said that he was curious about people and decided to actually meet them and visit with them. The people were those with labels. Here are a few of the chapter titles.

The Open Borders Professor

The BLM Supporter

The Radical Feminist Sex Worker

The Emotional Support Squirrel Caretaker

The Transwoman Who Identifies as a Wolf

Each of these chapters are about a real person this author has met. OMG. Where he found these people I have no idea but if you read just one chapter, you will be led to believe that THESE are the people who make up the mainstream of the Democratic Party. In each chapter he cannot help himself but to describe each outlier as someone reflective of any of us with a liberal persuasion. Just listen to this paragraph about the author’s determination on how liberals perceive homelessness. My dad read it to me expecting me…his known liberal daughter to find it truthful.

“Chronic homelessness is a choice for most people. Nearly all of them you talk to tell you that. The problem is the government doesn’t want to listen. Liberals keep spending money on the homeless and homelessness goes up. Liberals then demand higher taxes to pay for more homeless services. Nobody tells you this, but the homeless, “problem” creates a lot of good paying jobs and titles for liberals who “help” the homeless. Homelessness goes down and those jobs and titles go away. Liberals would rather feel compassionate helping the homeless stay comfortable on the streets than address the main drivers of homelessness: drug addiction, mental illness, and permissive city laws that allow camping out on public property.”

I love my dad but I absolutely hate what this last decade with Fox News has done to his way of seeing the world. In 2007 my dad read Barack Obama’s autobiography because he had heard so much about him from others and wanted to know more about him from his own lips. Still possessing that kind of curiosity, he ordered this book called Get It Together by Jesse Watters. Apparently he’s Fox’s idea of a healthy replacement for Tucker Carlson.

In the paragraph I quoted here, it is just incredible how he creates this entire narrative after visiting a few homeless people on the street. Building this entire tall tale that it is the liberals who are NOT addressing the actual causes of homelessness but are instead focused on coddling the homeless really blew my mind into shreds! OMG, the reality couldn’t be further from this man’s perspective. The only way to address mental illness and addiction is to find a way to pay for those services!! What a total dipshit this guy must be! I’m sorry but there is no other alternative. Now my dad is going to be mentally armed to think he knows “the truth” when in reality he knows the exact opposite. He will vote for conservatives with the idea that he is supporting mental health and addiction services by doing so!!

I don’t know if it is worth wasting any anger on my father – actually, I do. It isn’t. My dad is just trying to educate himself and do what’s right. This guy, though. He’s not interested in understanding reality. Not that as a liberal I actually do but I can tell with you much personal experience that when it comes to anyone giving a rat’s ass about addiction and mental health services it is NOT the Conservatives in our government. The Conservatives who do are the ones in the churches where there are mission programs etc. but all of what those people do has to be done through private donations and trust me there is hardly any money addressing actual treatment services for addiction and mental health. I was also disgusted to hear him say that chronic homeless is a choice for most people. He says that with authority and bravado with zero substance to validate the claim. NO ONE chooses homelessness, chronically so or otherwise!

I’m here with my parents because they are both frail and inching toward their most senior years. We won’t be talking about any more of this and have plenty of other topics that we can talk about. It is different this year than either 2016 or 2020 overall. I am no longer surprised or devastated by what I hear and I am much more convinced that at the end of this season, whenever that will be, truth will win out on both sides of this political climate. With the recent vote to support Ukraine and it’s bipartisan support, the crazies are being routed. Let’s hope it’s a new day for all of us…and let’s hope that Trump has to answer for his behavior sooner rather than later.

Geez…what a trip.

I’m doing a new (for me) meditation practice of late. I allow myself to feel what I am genuinely feeling and allow it to just be what it is. It’s taking awhile to learn. First it’s been interesting to discover that what I’m thinking at a given moment is a reflection of the feeling and not the feeling itself. Ya, this still doesn’t always make sense but when it does? It really does.

Today I made myself get up at 4:30. I woke up after a crappy night’s sleep with short sleeps accompanied by weird dreams. Yesterday was an emotional day.

Dean has been in KC for work.

It was 80+ and it’s not even March.

Our 45th psychotic and pathological narcissist POTUS dares to believe he’s the Christ belonging on a throne and way too many people in my life agree with him.

My best friend is in a lot of pain from MS and/or something else and I hate it.

Brene Brown says courage and vulnerability are what it takes to show when we can’t control outcomes.

Well…here I am. This is my showing up.

Fear.

Fear is what I feel. Fear is what I am sitting with. The thing is I rarely know it specifically fear. Different from being afraid. Fear is a deeper emotion in my body. One that I’ve been taught shouldn’t be there. Should = shame because the real deal is that it IS in me. It is what I feel and it is because I am alive and human.

I have no problem acknowledging when I’m afraid. That comes naturally. But the fear I don’t want to feel is the force underneath what I do, how I behave and act.

I do things like overly binge watch a British crime series or three. I mean, why not embellish it and find much crazier stuff to compare my life to.

I also do things like move into analysis mode as if I’m working in Army Intelligence. What could go wrong with overthinking things like issues in the HOA that pop up on FB or the latest issue my doctor talked to me about…or…and on it goes.

The challenge to just sit with an emotion and call it what it is without doing a thing to alter it? This, my friends is hard work but as I have done it, it has occurred to me that this emotion of fear will not cease to exist and by pretending that I can rid myself of it, I will likely be more attached to it than I need to be. I am more likely to cope with it in ways that will not serve me all that well.

Sitting with the reality that down in my core I have significant fear isn’t proving to be a myopic dive into darkness. It is instead giving me a sense of relief because it is just part of my real life. I can see that it is a real emotion that doesn’t need to be squashed or fed. All it needs is to be acknowledged.

I went to bed last night after hearing that our former POTUS, the guy with at one time 91 felony indictments…now literally convicted of rape, fraud and paying exorbitant fines…literally said that the black vote will be his because he now has a mug shot?

How are we still here? How are we even considering that it would be a relatively reasonable thing to consider choosing to put someone with that vile coming from his being into a place of such responsibility?

This was spoken where the MAGA faithful have gathered this week. They might as well call themselves the party of vile fools pretending to be the religious faithful. It’s so vile that most don’t even hear what is it coming from their own lips anymore. These creepers have convinced the average and unaware largely rural and white Christian voters that they are holy and anointed, that HE is holy and anointed. As he babbles and wanders with word trains that barely make sense, they convince themselves that he actually got things done FOR this country. When you ask them to tell you what they go to the SCOTUS nominees – the border – and avoid the really great stuff like, January 6th…paying off a porn star…raping women (there is a long list)…not paying off contractors who did actual work for him…it’s just surreal that this is what it means to be Conservative, Christian and American to so many people. I’ve been mulling it over this morning and it reminded me of something I’ve been hearing spoken out loud more and more of late. The idea that white Republican Americans need to have more babies. I.Kid.You.Not.

A couple of months ago a young dad I was talking to told me that he really had to have several kids because it was important to keep his genetics going. I have lived 63 years on this earth and never been told that by anyone. I have heard Christian leaders say similar things but never have I heard it from someone like that. It was one thing to quote a verse about a full quiver from the Bible – maybe it is one and the same, I’m not sure but it felt like an entirely other thing to determine to breed extra children exclusively to protect one’s genetic line in the world. Isn’t that whole paradigm what led to destroying millions during WWII? But this has made me think about what is really at the core of all of this MAGA stuff and how a pathological narcissist reprobate can become POTUS, try to overthrow the government and yet still remain a serious contender for another try at it. Think about it with me.

I have some Christian friends who have told me that they don’t like Trump and might consider a vote for Biden but if he would die and Kamala Harris would become POTUS the country would be finished. Seriously?! All I could think of was that she is more capable of managing her personal checking account than the likes of the 45th POTUS. It begs the question why would she be a greater threat? I can only concur that with Trump’s proven character now being crystal clear, the issue cannot possibly be concern about policy.

I have come to the conclusion that is this. Our 45th POTUS is still here for one reason and one reason only, because he is the descendent of a white industrialist patriarch who is perceived to have made America great. That is all there is left. The average church goer will pacify themselves with nonsense about God anointing him, that he’s supposedly pro-life, yada, yada, yada but they know that the real threat is that anyone who isn’t white, male and devoted to industry and agriculture the way that early industrialists and farmers were will only bring ruin to our country.

Trump is white.

Trump is male.

Trump claims to be Christian.

No where is this more obvious than here in Texas where every big oil baron is white, male and Evangelical. There is a guy in West Texas pouring money into the GOP bank account and will literally threaten with harm any Republican who tries to hold his chosen politicians accountable. It seems very clear that the MAGA Republicans left supporting 45 are still here whether they know it or not, for white supremacy in wealth and control. Full Stop. All of the other issues? Smoke and mirrors.

She’s everywhere right now. I’m not even going to say who she is but unless you are living securely under a rock, you know of whom I speak. She has bothered us as collective species for a long time. Back in the day when she began in Country Music and sang Tim McGraw at one of their annual award shows with the actual Tim McGraw sitting in the front row, her fans were blown away. Then after finishing the song and watching her go off stage, right up to him to shake his hand and say, “Hi, I’m Taylor.” We knew this person was going places.

The young artist with a small but increasing platform back then in 2006, is now, in 2024 very literally the most talked about woman on planet earth and part of the reason that is so is because stupid people who think of themselves as enlightened and above the rest of mankind are saying crap like this.

I have questions.

1)Taylor Swift grew up in church?! What does that even mean?? Is she Lutheran? Catholic? Methodist? Baptist? Does it matter?

2)She has publicly claimed to be a Christian. Didn’t you say she grew up in church?

3) She’s didn’t like a politician and spoke out against said politician while publicly claiming to be a Christian. What kind of Christian are you looking for??

4)Taylor Swift’s parents are Conservative?? What does that even mean?? How do you know that?? Because they didn’t want her to speak out?? They didn’t want her to speak out FOR HER OWN SAFETY from the likes of YOU!

5)How did Jesus succeed for her?? Isn’t she considered promiscuous by you?? Aren’t her songs about all those relationships??

6)She is not enough because she keeps raising the bar for success??? Wait, isn’t that a goal of ALL good Republicans???

7)Satan and Witchcraft await?? And that is because she is…successful??? Dating Travis Kelce??? Do they offer mental healthcare for employees where you work? Seriously.

Taylor Swift is successful.

It has nothing to do with Jesus.

I am here to say that after 18 years of following her career and listening to her music, I’m still here because she’s just that good. I’m still here because she is still putting out music that speaks to me. I’m turning 63 in a month and can say without a doubt she’s successful because she is a good person doing good work and a whole lot of us have put down some serious cash to buy her music and attend her concerts FOR A LONG TIME. And guess what? We who have witnessed her proven character (something the Bible actually talks about) are still here.

We are still here because quite honestly, when the idiots are out there screaming over and over again that the sky is falling, she is dealing with her real life and telling us about it. 

We are still here because we happen to like it that she likes her parents and her parents support her without making anything about them. 

We are still here because this woman while being very very successful, doesn’t make us hate ourselves.

We are still here because we need the gift of her music.

This is why she’s here too.

The best thing that could have happened to Travis Kelce is to be matched by partner who does not need his life but instead wants a relationship with him. The best thing for Taylor Swift is equally to have a partner who doesn’t need her life but wants a relationship with her.

We are still here because at the end of the day, the material success that these two have achieved is just a sideshow and yet because it is, we can enjoy that show with them.

📸 Look at this post on Facebook https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-astonishing-transformation-of-austin?fbclid=IwAR1x2XJvPdLoCXpBbRRla9P-WSUGeUM7VxQcG0TUfGMOhr3gt5NbIluLsX8_aem_AfDPR5RgujZiEDkLmJ88Al6UqcDr4a1L1e9oJyuqR-kLqfI-ByY6T26Rj-kRsFU-ckc

This is now an older take on Austin’s transformation. I was able to taste what it was through visits from 2001 on – a friend in Dripping Springs grew up here and would take me around the city every time I came to town. In 2008 my son moved here with his girlfriend, a Texas native. Dean and I would visit and experience this eclectic gathering of “weird” people and couldn’t imagine living here. It was always fun to visit but the heat and humidity combined with our love for the Wasatch and Wellsville mountains in Utah made it a certainty that we’d never come here. WELL…three grandchildren changed our minds.

This is now home – we’ve adjusted and are happy here. That said, like many of our peers, we are very concerned for the future. Surrounded by people with a good amount of disposable income because of the tech bubble we now live in, there is a rising sense of entitlement in the air and I don’t mean government entitlement. There is an increasingly overburdened middle class providing the infrastructure everyone depends upon and an aversion to paying taxes like I’ve never seen before.

Maybe it’s becoming more like this everywhere and because my own circumstances have allowed for growth in my own material expectations, I’m just seeing it for the first time. I’m not sure. Nonetheless, it’s my observation that when we as people have more than we need for the basics to survive, we seem to become a lot less interested in leveling the ground than my life as a Republican would have ever led me to believe.

Those mentoring me in high school and college presented me with the paradigm of Trickle Down Economics. Because I was a Reagan Republican I listened carefully and learned in family discussions, sermons at church and in multiple Bible studies, that our gifting was meant to be a temporary boost once in a while but the thing that mattered most…the most important thing…was that people learned to become self sufficient. I still believe that but not exclusively. I later learned and very much believed this was a biblical mandate especially for government. I accepted that it was a given that prosperity from God was attached to right behavior. So when a person has the good fortune to become rich, it’s a blessing from God because that person is obviously good and of course, worked for it.

Well, then I became an Evangelical Christian and there encountered biblical passages that said quite the opposite. I was given the example of the widow at the altar who put her last penny in the plate and Jesus said her gift was way more important that the rich guy’s huge one. He gave out of his abundance. She gave all she had.

Following that tale, I heard a story about what happened when the promised Holy Spirit came upon the followers of Jesus after he ascended back to heaven. When filled with the Spirit everyone in attendance brought their stuff together and shared it it so that no one lacked anything.

I am sure that I wasn’t the only one who wrestled with all of this but as a highly sensitive person with a mind that is always on, I never quite understood how these two perspectives could actually coexist. But as with many, many things, we Evangelical born again’ers from the 70’s Jesus movement could take any diametrically opposing viewpoints and intellectually blend them in a way that they made sense. At the end of the day though, we all did what we thought was right in our own mind…another biblical admonition that was to be avoided and never was. I digress.

Entitlement is, in my mind, defined as the belief that we have a right to something because we have the right prerogative. We believe that we are inherently deserving of the privileges or special treatment that come with being someone or being somewhere. Ironically, so many of our world’s original religious leaders claimed to be without it.

The religious leader I know best. Jesus, claimed that he wasn’t personally entitled to much. Foxes have holes, birds have nests… the Son of Man? No place to rest his head. His admonition to his followers?
Seek first the Kingdom.
Ask and you shall receive
Turn the other cheek
Forgive 70×7
And the list goes on.

Jesus was focused on absolute surrender to God. Jesus enjoyed fine wine and fasted forty days. Jesus told a woman brought to him after she was caught in the act of adultery (still irks me that the partner was a non issue) that she could leave after he told the men that if they were without sin they could go for it and stone her to death. She walked away.

Obviously, I am not like Jesus because I live in a nice house. Oh, wait. Because he’s “preparing a mansion for me in heaven” he must approve of mansions here on earth so my nice house qualifies, right? This is a great example of the mind bending or truth blending we do to make sense of what we want.

Austin…in Texas…and what Jesus thinks are the worldviews that create the paradigm of thought most prevalent here in the surrounding suburbs. Our politicians are for the most part, in agreement that to be Texan is to be part of the biblical “chosen race, royal priesthood and holy nation”. I’ve heard it said that Austin though, is an anomaly. I recently heard it described as a “Liberal cesspool (Moms of Liberty)” and must be redeemed by book bans, laws against diversity education and inclusion, laws against gay people and especially transgender humans. No where in this state is there a love hate relationship that is stronger than the one Texans feel for its capitol.

As I continue reading Liz Cheney’s account of the realities of January 6th I am blown away by the depth of incompetence in what has now become the GOP. Policy differences pale in comparison to utter loyalty to the “Orange Jesus”, as one southern Congressional Rep referred to him when participating in a charade rejection of the vote. He actually said “The things we do for the Orange Jesus” FFS!

The GOP Representatives in our government are increasingly uneducated, almost illiterate and have no depth of philosophical or actual understanding of their own actual beliefs let alone American government. The people who acted so duplicitously throughout the January 6 inquiry are the epitome of Pavlov’s dogs salivating as Trump rings the bell!! Whether given their treat or not they show up and obey accordingly.

One by one the people who actually knew just enough of the Constitution to KNOW that what was being done by the Orange Jesus was unconstitutional, sacrificed every shred of their soundness of mind to cow tow to his lunacy. Their “base” demanded it! It is terrifying how once sane people are now like the Wives of Stepford living each day mindlessly walking through the world saying. “Yes, Dear.” AND here is where Liz and I share common ground.

Liz Cheyney, a devout Conservative Republican , and I are equally dealing with this reality in our personal lives. Beyond the halls of government in DC , like me, Liz has lost personal friends down the rabbit hole of Q anon, the rabbit hole of charismatic prophets with the idea that Trump really is our Messiah, the rabbit hole that he is a prolife POTUS, and the rabbit hole of exclusive devotion to far right media like Tucker Carlson and the sewage pit of untruths he’s built for their intellectual lives to settle into. We have both have suffered the loss of very dear people in our personal lives who now refuse to see reality. Anything against Trump is a liberal plot. Anything for Joe Biden is an Antifa fueled protest!

I am now in what I refer to as a civil connect relationship with just about everyone in my life. In this relationship I have chosen to communicate only about the very basics of my life. These people know that I love them, they know I will be there in a crises for them, but because every word has the potential to be an ignition switch for them to erupt and demand my allegiance to the Orange Jesus, we connect no where else. I’m no longer interested in connecting with anyone who is unwilling to grasp reality.

Liz Cheyney and I have shared this lived experience. We have lost very special people in our lives because we will not follow the Orange Jesus. We also share this truth. The Democratic Republic we both love will require an awakened populace if this overthrow is going to be stopped. The stakes could not be higher.

“…God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true and beautiful.”

Father Richard Rohr Falling Upward

As I write this post today I can say only that I have found Father Rohr’s words to be true in my own life. His words here were instructive and pivotal for me when I was in a really broken place.

The year was 2011 and I was on break for the Minnesota’s teachers convention in October. I had battled acid reflux for several years by this point so decided that the fundoplication surgery recommended for me was the way to stop it. The procedure involves a wrap around the esophagus near the entrance to the stomach so that you are unable to reflux. Continual reflux, as well as being a nuisance, puts you at a higher risk for esophageal cancer so it was to be the best solution for me. It became instead, the nightmare before Christmas on steroids!

Five days post op my stomach flipped up into my chest wall through a repaired hiatal hernia. Whisked by ambulance to Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis, I had the surgery repeated in the middle of the night. It was brutal. The next day after the surgeon came in and abruptly whipped the NG tube from my nose she said almost with glee that she didn’t put a drain in my chest wall. Six weeks later the fate of that decision hit me full on.

I became more ill than I had ever been that Thanksgiving in Nebraska. After multiple trips to the ER I was told to return to Abbot ASAP. I had a severe plural effusion that was unable to be drained by a chest tube. Arriving there, they tried to drain it again and were unsuccessful. Upon consultation with a thoracic surgeon I was told that my lower left lung had also collapsed and that in a few hours I would be having surgery to inflate it and drain the effusion. Just prior to surgery my doctor while speaking to my husband (!!!!!) with me on the gurney waiting to be wheeled into the OR said that he used the VATS (video assisted thoracic surgery) method and that it would normally require just a few incisions…BUT in about 10% of his patients he has to open the chest. Dean and I both knew that would be me. It was.

Almost one month later to the day I ate lunch with Dean when he came home from work and an hour later drove myself to the hospital. Gallbladder attack. Surgery number four. The local hospital wouldn’t touch me so it was back to Minneapolis.

The next two years were full of chronic pain, the end of my professional career and the most severe depression I have ever experienced. It became so bad that we moved closer to the Twin Cities in hopes that the change would help. When, after 18 months, little had changed, we went back to our beloved Cache Valley in N Utah. It helped to get away from the dark and lengthy northern winters but the fight to find life and meaning was arduous and constant. It was as if the multiple surgeries and especially the opening of my chest took out the center of me and if I let go of the desire to live for one real minute, I would entirely disappear.

Dean was my rock and with him I could be honest. I promised not to take my life but told him repeatedly that I my only desire to live was because of the pain my disappearance would bring to him, Stephen and Hannah. I would like to say that those days are way, way behind me. They are further behind than they have ever been but the darkness is ever present.

Father Rohr’s book Falling Upward was published in 2011. It was on my radar after I had read his book Everything Belongs where upon reading it I understood so much about my own seemingly odd spiritual journey. It was natural to expect that his next book would be equally validating and important for me. I asked Dean to bring it to me in the hospital. I had no idea that it would become a life manual and still be here by my side in 2023 reorienting me once more as I break through yet another really dark season.

This time, alongside Father Rohr’s guidance another deep soul, the poet David Whyte, has once again arrived right on time with a series of talks he’s giving this next three weeks on how to return to a single focus and an undistracted mind. In essence I’m simply returning to the real. The life that is my own.

David talks about leaning into the conversation and hearing what our lives are speaking to us. Inhabiting our surroundings as our real life – our present life as it actually is.

Today when I picked up Falling Upward, Father Rohr’s words…

“Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath everyday events.” reminded me again that life – actual life is the one thing I genuinely desire. I really do dislike the superficial and it makes me such a hard friend and family member. I’m sorry but equally not sorry if you’ve encountered that part of me. Going deeper puts off so many people that it can be quite lonely. That said too much introspection and I it’s just another way to escape the work of inhabiting the conversation of my real life. Contemplation is vital to spiritual and personal growth but truly if it doesn’t enter my real, there is no point.

I believe that the words I shared at the beginning reflect the redirection that always comes and proves itself to be required for me to move out from under heavy burden of darkness that comes with clinical depression often brought on in my life by medical procedures (and navigating the system) Antidepressant medication is vital for me because my brain has lost so much of the natural feel good chemicals it once possessed but meds alone wouldn’t be sufficient. I must always find the will to desire again and then to desire deeply. I can only do that when I am in the conversation of my real life – the real of my surroundings are guiding me to be present, to be here. Hands down – this return guides me through the seasons full of really hard days and I am so very grateful. I believe that desire in the purest form lives only in the present moment and that once realized there, all other forms of healthy and good desire begin again…and move us forward.

It’s just incredible.

Thanks for following me here. My post was a bit of a mess – sorry, please ignore the first one and read it at janegettingreal.com

This year – the last 12 months have been rough. Last week as friends were gathering in the neighborhood for a chat I was being discharged from the ER after being there all day. Armed with pain meds and anti-inflammatory meds I planned to rest. A few hours later I had what felt like a gall bladder attack. I do not have one.

It’s been off and on like this for several years but this time it’s the worst it’s been. A call to a 24 nurse line at St David’s walked me through my symptoms. The end result was to see a doctor within 24 hours. See your Primary Care Physician is always the first suggestion. The doctor who barely knows your name, sees you for the basics once a year and who virtually has no idea what to do about your GI issues so always passes the baton to the GI specialist? That doctor?

Saturday arrives and I go back to the ER. This time after several hours and it’s crystal clear I need a GI consult…hmm, how many hours, days and Dr visits have there been before now? Too many. The ER Dr. Admits me after talking to them. I am scheduled for an ERCP, a special endoscopy to look at a dilated area on the bile duct. Known about since I lived in Minnesota. Ignored because labs didn’t indicate I was having liver problems.

Sunday morning I have the ERCP. The on all GI specialist removes several small stones and gravel from my bile duct. At first look the dilated duct measure 16mm. Normal for my age is 6mm. It was a big deal and I’m told to expect I will feel a lot better in the days ahead. I’m grateful but the toll on the rest of me now that it’s over is proving to be a major one.

I de-activated my FB account last week because I needed a way to detach from so much information and focus on being present in my own life. I deleted the Threads App long ago. Instagram is FB lite so I’m an occasional visitor there but the detachment from the FB “Borg” saved me this week. I’d also just had one of those encounters there that make you slap your forehead while asking yourself how on earth you ended up in that drama again!! So… bye for now, FB.

I’m a highly sensitive person which just means I feel everything LONG before I intellectually process it. I’m also someone who has a really really hard time letting go of good people. Facebook takes on addictive properties for me when while I need to accept my human capacity for connection and get off or disconnect, I stay on and stay connected.

About a month ago, someone I let go of for the 2nd time in the last decade, sent me a message and asked if she had offended me somehow. Nothing triggers old patterns in my way of relating to people than drawing a boundary and being misunderstood or being understood and then being pushed back for it if it has to do with friendship. It’d been over a year, so I’d totally forgotten removing this person from my friends list. She hadn’t even missed me until a mutual friend passed away and she saw my comment on a feed about her. The out of the blue…”I thought we were friends…Did I offend you?” arrived in Messenger and I fell into the abyss.

I know that for so many of my less sensitive friends you’re thinking – “Don’t respond!” Just walk away. Not me. I go head into but… this is _______, I must explain. No, I do not.

The truth about this person is that she does actually offend me on FB but I don’t want to touch why with a ten foot pole. I don’t need to be in her life or she in mine for any reason. But the truth is also that this very opportunity for a disgruntled “friend” to pop up and challenge a boundary requires that I’m able to do the actual ignoring. When I’m physically challenged it’s just harder to stay focused because I’m weaker and in need myself. I’m even more sensitive than on a regular day and vulnerable to the things I’ve worked hard to overcome in my life. Perfection and people pleasing most of all. But alas, this time I have permanently disconnected with this person.

The after effects of our whole exchange made me take a long pause at why I think at 62 I must stay on the FB platform. In the middle of my ongoing health problems I also began to realize that I really needed all of my own mental and emotional energy to continue to navigate the situation I was dealing with. In the last 12 months I’ve had two major surgeries, at least a dozen ER visits, countless portal messages back and forth with a GI doctor I finally had to fire. The patronization and perception that I wasn’t really all that sick led to way too many diagnoses and medications than there ever should have been. I actually had to bring test results to his attention and ask questions about them beca his nurse didn’t give him the info. It was just a lot of work and after a special MRI revealed that the bile duct was growing but it would be five weeks before he would be able to see me, I found someone else. A very good doctor and staff replaced him.

A note about ER visits before I continue – all of them are generally awful – one involved eight tries for an IV before I walked out, completely spent. When a neighboring patient in a small room with six others called someone to bitch about the ER doc not agreeing order an MRI on her foot, ignoring everyone else, yelling into her phone while the RN tried just one more poke on me and failed, I nearly exploded. I got up and walked out just spent.

I am discovering that it’s time to stay away from Facebook and keep this new strength I’ve been tapping into. I would not have endured the last two weeks had I been there. Instagram is working and is just enough but for now I’m going to do as the poet David Whyte suggests, “Start close in”. My REAL is here in my own life.

The term spiritual bypassing was coined by psychologist John Wellwood when his study led him to conclude that people within his religion were using religious beliefs to avoid personal change. I don’t remember when I was first presented with this concept but it was one that described my own experiences with many people in my life especially when my own child was diagnosed with mental illness. 

Having been in her life’s pain with her as a result of my own traumatic pregnancy and birth experience with her, having not been able to hold her at birth and for the month afterwards, I knew where her brain’s dysfunction was rooted but had no idea how to get her the help she needed. At that time in my life everything was unfortunately about God and Satan battling life out using human beings to do it so I believed that we would be exempt from the realities of her trauma. I believed that God was on the side of those who had accepted Jesus into their heart and everyone else on Satan’s. Trusting anyone outside of that bubble was only done in order to influence them toward understanding and making that decision to trust in Christ for personal salvation. Reality, however, became a brutal mentor in teaching me that much of what I believed was not rooted in the real world. At some point I realized that like my community, I was very skilled in the art of spiritually bypassing.

It is so ironic when I think about my life before I was so brutally confronted with the reality that neglect of my child’s mental and emotional needs had brought us to the place where she was dying right in front of me. Ironic because the church I was a part of,  and the Evangelical faith overall, was also about dealing with our personal sin, repenting and conforming ourselves to Christ’s image. I can’t even count the times when someone more spiritually mature confronted me and challenged me to understand my own faults, to repent and commit to Christ’s example. Sadly, that practice also led to the profound capacity to encourage the bypassing of very human realities. One particular incident where my child is concerned really stands out to me. 

One day, as I often did, I listened to an episode of Focus on the Family. On this particular day the guest was discussing grief and loss in the life of a Christian. She encouraged the listener to understand that along with being a spiritual being, Christians are also human beings. She went on to say that it was important to acknowledge one’s loss and grieve over it. I had experienced a lot of loss when my water broke at 13 weeks – when my child was born under anesthesia during an emergency c-section – when I sat alone in the hospital in a private room because the doctors were sure that she was going to be born dead when I returned back to the floor. I had experienced SO much pain and so much loss that I could not feel because in my world at the time it was all God’s will for us. I wasn’t able to hide all of it from my church family but I did do my best to adhere to the “God is good all the time” mantra so commonly spoken in our faith. 

That evening when I was at a Bible study I shared with an older woman how much the episode had meant to me and how it gave me permission to accept that I had genuinely lost a lot and needed to allow myself the space to feel it and grieve over it. This person, without any hesitation whatsoever said, “Oh, there is NO loss in Jesus.” She went on to tell me that were I to believe there was loss, I would suffer and so would my daughter. This “friend” was literally telling me to spiritually bypass my present reality and sadly, I took her reproof into my heart and did just that. It would be 17 years later before I would wake up and begin to break free of that toxic worldview. It would take a decade more before I would have the courage to leave it behind me altogether. As one on the outside of it now but living in the heart of Evangelical Texas, I see and experience continual examples of this spiritual bypass where reality beckons to be heard. 

As I write this our Texas attorney general is in the middle of an impeachment trial. Sadly, Mr. Ken Paxton an Evangelical Christian who believed himself to be anointed by God to force Conservative values onto the state’s people through his office, is daily going down in flames. Mr. Paxton went into the AG’s office with such a radical agenda that he actually neglected the regular duties of that office and the State of Texas is paying a huge cost for it. When his staff or others would confront him in any way, he blew it off because he believed himself to be in subjection only to “God’s law” (I’m not sure he actually even knows the content of anything actually in the Bible but I digress.) This man, actually re-elected here in Texas in spite of the reality that he had committed multiple crimes, had even successfully delayed his own trial through abuses of the AG’s office fully expecting that he would not ever be held accountable. 

When a lawsuit by his former staff resulted in a settlement of several million dollars, Ken Paxton’s delusion of anointing was so complete that he actually had the balls to ask the Texas Legislature to pay the bill for him and expected them to readily do so! That request was just the wake up call many Christians needed to actually face reality. 

The Texas House and Senate were not of such a mind and now his actual character, his actual moral compass, or lack thereof, is finally being exposed for what it has always been. The people of Texas who shared in his delusion will either continue to deflect and claim this is a radical plot by a woke mob to persecute their anointed one OR they will face the reality that he is a cheat, a liar and not anointed by anyone but his own self. It would make sense in a healthy soul for one to feel an enormous sense of betrayal and to question how they were so duped to begin with. Reality should work that way. Unfortunately, strongly held religious beliefs are very hard to change. We build our mental framework around them, our culture and family structures too. Facing reality is brutally hard work. That said, I hope there are those willing to do it for the sake of Texas and this whole country. 

The people founding this country knew that if one religious persuasion were to take over in the government, the result would be catastrophic to our Republic. Even acknowledging God in a public way is very different for the American people than it is to declare that this is a Christian country. When you do that you put blinders on toward any one else of a different persuasion and become something other than a free country. This is what I believe has happened to the Republican Party. It has been taken over by Christian Nationalists like Ken Paxton and those with the goal to take over control of the nation and if they could, the world. Ken Paxton is just one of them. It’s time to wake up. 

Last week I went to the hospital for an iron infusion. I’ve been a bit anemic since surgery in January and since I don’t tolerate oral supplements this was the way to go. While entering the room for my third infusion, I was the fourth patient and as a result the main lights had to be turned on so the nurse could see my vein for the IV. Once the infusion starts they use lamps because some people have to sit there for a long time. With the brightness in the room I was able to see the others very well. To my left a woman from India I had met at a previous visit on IV nutrition in the early stages of her first pregnancy. She’d been unable to keep anything down for with weeks. Going clockwise around the room in the next recliner was a black woman in  the same situation and after skipping the next recliner was a white man receiving steroids for MS. Once my IV was in place and the infusion started, the lights were turned back off and we were just sitting there in the quiet. I can’t remember who talked first, but it wasn’t long before the four of us and our nurses were chatting up a storm. 

Renata, one of the nurses, spoke with a thick east central European accent. She is a quite a character with strong opinions and a heart as big as the ocean. It wasn’t long before we learned that she began her life here in Austin over 20 years ago after having left her home country of Yugoslavia  with her husband in a fight for their lives as a civil war raged behind them. They came with two suitcases and $1200. She didn’t tell us this but I know from previous study that she and her husband also arrived with debt to the American government for the travel costs to bring them here. Her story is one of resilience and purpose. 

Next, the lovely woman from India. She had come to the US, Rochester, NY, as a college student to study computer engineering. She became a hardware engineer and works for a company here in Austin that designs the chips we use in our phones and other electronics. Her husband went to college in Wisconsin, graduated with the same degree and also works at the same company as a hardware engineer. 

Next we have Robin. Robin is the black woman with a personality that made me think that if I fell down in the hallway, this woman would not just help me back up to my feet,  but would be the kind who would stick with me until she knew that I was going to be okay. She is pregnant with her second girl. Robin works for Tesla as a claims adjuster because Tesla offers its buyers car insurance and many prefer that because the cars have been and are unique to repair after an accident. 

Last of all, the man with MS. I don’t know where he is from or what his name is but I did learn that he was born several months premature and could fit inside his grandfather’s hand at birth. He talked about life with MS and how one day he had an episode where his entire left side just stopped working. After a few infusions of steroids he was back to functioning like normal only he couldn’t sleep from the side effects. He is a software engineer and spoke with a pretty significant accent I would guess to be Russian or Eastern European. 

Then there was me. ME. The 62 year old retired teacher, white midwestern woman who moved here with her husband to be near her son and his young family. I ended up sharing the whole tale about being told by my son that I would never be a grandma to now being a grandma of three precocious little boys. They were all smiles when we talked about Bobby, AJ and Finn. 

I share this because every day that I live holds the opportunity for similar experiences. It doesn’t frighten me in the least bit when I am the only natural born, white Christian woman in the room. I may be an odd duck, but I will always lean into these situations because I am certain to leave them with a deeper appreciation for life itself and specifically for life this Democratic Republic that we all call home. 

The late seventies was a time when Americans of my generation were seeking to create a better world than the one they had grown up in. As children we grew with stories from the Great Depression, two World Wars, The Korean Conflict and The Vietnam War and then lived for years in the shadow of Communist Russia. My generation experienced an energy crisis that made it necessary for the government to mandate a 55 mph speed limit. It even darkened our Christmas that year with a prohibition on outdoor Christmas lights. Around that same time President Nixon was impeached and the singer Jim Croche was killed in a plane crash. We lived with the threat that our brain on drugs was like an egg in a frying pan. It was all back in good old days, right?

Religion in the late 70’s had mixed reviews and for most of us in the Midwest it was just part of the landscape we grew up in. My family was part of a theologically liberal Lutheran denomination where infant baptism, confirmation, communion and then membership all happened because we were born Lutheran. It was barely relevant to my family or to me personally. When the Evangelicals came along with their emphasis on a personal faith they also made it clear that my Lutheran church had been so influenced by secular humanism that it was no longer true. What was true according to them was that I was a sinner, separated from God and that in order to be a true Christian I would have to ask Jesus into my heart. I did that and shortly thereafter joined the Southern Baptist church that most of my new friends went to.

I found my life’s center in this new faith primarily because I was so welcomed and wanted. A year after entry into this world, when I was 17, one of the leaders of the youth group approached me and asked me to consider joining a small group from the church going on a road trip to Dallas, Texas, to attend a seminar called The Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts. He explained that it was going to be a seminar taught by Bill Gothard whose expertise was in explaining the Bible in a way that made it easy to understand. I couldn’t wait to join them.

The seminar did not disappoint. It was an entire week long with a lecture every evening on M-Th and then all day on Friday and Saturday. It was the equivalent of an intense summer camp. I was surrounded by the perfect combination of people and places in the midst of a full on immersion of biblical passages and what they were said to mean. I was away from all that was familiar to me and day after day I became convinced that God had brought me there to change my life. I left and committed my life to becoming all that Bill Gothard had encouraged those in attendance to be.

I arrived back home after the seminar and immediately broke away from all of my friends. I threw away all of my secular music and vowed to stop smoking. I studied the seminar syllabus a lot and vowed to date and marry a growing Christian. My choices were continually reinforced by the youth group leaders, the people in my church and my new friends. I loved my new life and never imagined that I would ever leave it.

By the time I graduated from high school and went off to college in 1979 the teachings from the IBYC (IBLP) had become intimately integrated into my life. I was guided by its perspectives but because I was on a secular campus I threw my energy into another para church ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ. There I quickly became a leader and enjoyed being mentored (discipled) by one of the full time staff at our campus. I met Dean in the ministry discovered that he too had been to the seminar and was a serious Christian. That seriousness was common among those of us who had attended at we shared a general admiration for its principles. I had dated other Christian men but few were like him. What distinguished him from the others for me was his willingness to learn, grow and change. I thank whatever God there is that I had that commitment, learned at the seminar, because it has saved me. I so easily could have ended up in an awful and toxic patriarchal marriage instead of the egalitarian relationship we’ve had from hello. This one single thing about us allowed us to think out loud with each other. Using our rational minds in the safety of each other eventually paved the way for us to break free. That said, it still took so very long to get there.

Shortly after our marriage we devoted ourselves to an Evangelical church that had split off from a small Southern Baptist church because after an associate pastor and some other members in the church attended the Advanced Institute In Basic Life Principles they were inspired to rethink church structure. After a period of study, the Baptist church held meetings for the congregation to consider changing its structure to become more in line with Bill Gothard’s authoritarian version of church government.

The pushback on any kind of structure other than the original democratic, majority rule one the church was founded with was not going to change. As a result, the associate pastor left with those loyal to him and started an entirely different church. Realities like this began to take shape all across the American Evangelical landscape in response to Bill Gothard’s seminars. He spoke as a mouthpiece for God and what no one seemed to grasp is that he’d created that image of himself, sold it to a small group first and then to larger and larger ones in succession until entire sports arenas were full of devoted, serious Christians who would soak up his every word.

Bill Gothard prepared those assembled together to accept his biblical expertise first by sharing his personal story. He told those gathered together that while he was in high school he would encounter problems and as he did he would memorize scripture to solve them. I can still hear him say the word scripture with a tonal quality that was mesmerizing to the devout. He went on to say that memorization proved insufficient so he began to look more deeply at specific verses, cross referencing them with others, making observations about the culture of the day and history in order to really come to understand the said scripture he started with. By the time he got to this part the crowd was pretty much under his spell.

Scripture memorization and meditation were seen by Evangelicals as the gold standard for understanding the will of God. We were taught that any kind of academic pursuit of the Bible or Christian faith by the liberally minded of our day had taken us away from the authentic gospel. The way to really grasp God through His Word (the Bible) was to memorize and meditate upon it. It was very much the way above all ways to know God. When this soft spoken, kind, perfectly attired in his Sunday church clothes, hair cut neat as a pin man opened his mouth with such reverence, the result was that he could say almost anything and those in attendance were going to buy into it. He convinced us that he had solved every basic problem to mankind through this method of study and observation in his youth and over time as he assembled his findings in a curriculum and taught them to others the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts was born. The name was later changed to the Institute in Basic Life Principles. Pretty brass, don’t you think? We didn’t even notice.

Those assembled listening to Bill Gothard that week when I attended in Dallas did so with utmost respect and deference to his conclusions about everything from self esteem, parental relationships and dating. I did too. We had no thought of questioning the reality of life as he presented it. Instead of grasping that a young man in high school had developed an obsession with perfection in response to his own issues, we saw him as the mouthpiece of God.

The lectures were personable and full of stories validating his perception of anointed insight. In the basic seminars I attended, Mr. Gothard did not emphasize his home school, quiverful teachings. Those came from his Advanced Seminar. Thankfully, I never did make it to one of those. In 1984 Dean traveled with a group from our church to somewhere in Kansas to attend the Advanced Seminar but I was dealing with some intense morning sickness and didn’t go. I remember vividly the continual ask from the leaders in my church to rethink my decision to stay home and trust God for the strength and stamina to go. I was relatively knew to the whole umbrella of authority in the context of a church like that so without any hesitation stood my ground with a firm no.

Sadly, that ability to know my own voice was chipped away at in the years to follow and I went to many a meeting, conference and worked way beyond what I should have in response to someone else’s determination that they had spiritual authority over me and my life. I take full responsibility for giving it to them but at the same time, I know full well that any time there is this kind of willingness to forego one’s own wise mind, they have been carefully molded by those they follow to do so. No person with a sound mind just jumps in and says, “I’ll do whatever you say no matter what the cost.” It just doesn’t happen that way, even in the military one has to learn how to follow without question.

My church community did not embrace Bill Gothard’s Advanced seminar and for that I am beyond grateful because had they, I am pretty sure Dean and I would have been right in the middle of it. We are so grateful for the highly educated people in our midst, especially a couple of family practice doctors who saw the reality of what a quiverful movement would bring to our lives. The stories of women harmed by this movement are many. Believing that God can over rule reality brought about any number of pregnancies that were medically fragile and ill advised. The tragedies of abuse that took place in homes in the years that followed this idea of having as many children as God gives you are abundant. Families lacking adequate food, clothing and shelter let alone adequate medical care etc. are scattered all over the America we live in at present. We are not one of those with that story. But we are one of those with a story of how destructive Bill Gothard’s Umbrella of Authority was. The idea that we are vulnerable to destructive temptations when we are not in submission to anointed authorities God has placed over nearly cost us everything.

I do not know what it was in us that gave us the courage to question our church authorities or those of Evangelical Christianity in general but our questions began early on and never stopped until we finally left. That said, the painful reality of departure is still with us. The reality that so much of what we understood as true was an entirely manufactured reality and had nothing to do with God has been a huge pill to swallow. Dealing with the grief and pain seems to never end. It doesn’t own us as much as it once did and yet, because of the reality that what began with Bill Gothard and others has morphed into a very radical far right political movement, it seems even more regretful as we count ourselves lucky to be removed from it.

We have been grateful for the real healers who came into our lives and have empowered us to be our best selves over the years. We are grateful for our children’s growth and clarity that continues to teach us. We’ve healed and are still healing. I write these posts most of all because to continue to heal I must own this story.

It must be time for me to be bold and more public about the reality that my life lived as a member of Christ is King Community Church in Norfolk, Nebraska, was a life lived in an actual cult. It was not lived in a bold, cutting edge evangelical world-changing unique church as I imagined that it was.

The church I devoted my life to, the one I would do anything for and the one I raised my children in was plain and simply an authoritarian entity directed by one man and a small group of those loyal to him. My parents were adamant that if I moved back home and joined his church, I would be joining a cult. I did it anyway. I did it because I loved God and I was so grateful to this man and his wife for having led me into the Evangelical faith. I have no idea how I would have figured life out without the incredible love, patience and overwhelming belief in me that came from these two people. I will always live in the paradox where deep gratitude and deep sorrow co-exist in equal measure.

The Pastor and his wife were genuinely some of the first adults in my life who genuinely paid attention to me, gave me vision for my life and cultivated my genuine faith in God. I was so grateful for them that I slowly became more devoted and loyal to them than I was to anyone else in my life. I was 16.

By the time I left for college (something that would have never been possible had I not met this man and his wife) my mentor had become an associate pastor. As was common in the late 70’s, Evangelicals were keen to study the Bible as it was literally written and many were aversive to any formal theological training. Not having this institutionalized training actually became an anointing of its own among many of us. Institutions were known to have been so influenced by the world and were therefore suspect. For most of us, to be influenced by the teaching of a devoted man who read the Bible as it was and devoted his whole life to it, was to choose the best faith over the nominal one. Like the first hit of heroin to an addict, ingesting the the certainty that the belief that you have found is the one right thing to guide your life, breaking free is almost impossible. I assumed my devotion was wholly to Jesus Christ, the Bible and the Evangelical faith for almost thirty years.

My departure from the church was a slow, painful one. My friends and I grew up as young fresh out of college adults. We became part of a church full of young zealous couples all believing in the certainty of our choices and making our way through life as a unit. As half-truths about us roamed around the small community, they served to empower us to be even more devoted with the firm belief that any opposition was spiritual warfare initiated and carried out by Satan. As our baby boomer parents threatened to disown us, that too worked to fuel our belief that we were indeed in a unique and special place. There was no one who could convince us that we were too loyal and too devoted. No one.

After five years of intense involvement in the church as a result of my teaching position in the small Christian school and our involvement in the children’s ministry, my body became the alarmist as I began to be continually ill with one thing after another. The life of a devoted CKCC’er in the “center of the Body” (referring to the Body of Christ) was one of overwhelming activity, lack of personal care and chuck full of stress, especially for me as an Evangelical female anomaly.

I was a working mother in a world of stay at home mothers. I was the “unique” exception to the rule because the church needed me to be. I was taught and bought into the belief that my children were really not MY children but in truth belonged to the Body. I was encouraged to release them to be cared for by others so I could care for others. It was, of course, utter nonsense but again, the specialness, the uniqueness and the certainty kept me highly invested and obedient.

I loved being a mom more than anything in my life so it was a huge ask for me to let that go but I did because The Body needed me to. I happened to love teaching elementary kids in almost equal proportion to being a mom so it was very fulfilling to go to work and do my job. Working full time brought a routine and order to my scattered brain that I cherished. It made my kids lives better too. Had that been all that was required of me, I would have been able to thrive in that role. But, sadly, it put me in the inner circle at CKCC and that was a place where leaders surrendered their personal lives to the degree that it became a prison of following commands until I entirely lost my ability to choose for myself. It was horrible.

Thankfully there existed within me enough sense of self that I was able to recognize some commands that came down the pike in the years to come as utterly batshit crazy and I found a way to stand up on my own two feet and say no. One of those commands came in a session of marriage counseling when an elder in the church told me that I needed to understand that my body was not my own but belonged to my husband. I left that session a changed woman because there was no way in all of heaven that I was going to buy into that. Thank God, I was also married to a man who wouldn’t buy into it either and the two of us left that place with a new reality under our belt.

I was in a cult. I have been almost silent about it being one for too long. I just wasn’t ready to be that real about it because I had so many close friends either still in it or unwilling to admit to the reality of it being one and I did not want to hurt them. I have since almost completely disconnected from everyone. It’s been an equal challenge to out what was Evangelical and what was Christ is King since leaving the church in 1998 and then leaving the Evangelical faith entirely in 2005.

Landing in Utah, one of the most religious states in the country, turned out to be the perfect place for me to explore my own beliefs and find my genuine self. The Cache Valley, the Wasatch Mountains, the Logan River, Tony Grove, Bear Lake, The Great Salt Lake and the Bear River Bird Refuge awakened my genuine spiritual life in a way no religion could possibly do. Road trips to the red rocks in Southern Utah were just incredible. As I first saw Bryce Canyon I was overwhelmed and put in a state of awe that is with me still. There is just no way to contain the power of the universe in one religion or most important to me, a small church full of its own importance in a small town in Nebraska.

There will be more to come…

This is the text I received from a good friend who knows that I’m all about understanding religious experiences and the religions they take place in. As I had absolutely no idea who this Heather Gay person was and because my friend is an extraordinary ally and advocate for “gay” people, I guessed it might be a memoir written by a gay Mormon. Crazy assumption, but the mind works how it does. Bad Mormon is not a gay coming out story. It is instead a story about a devout woman member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints awakening to the reality that she finds no place for her real self to exist in the church she spent most of her life in.

Bad Mormon begins with Heather, a young girl growing up in a loving middle to upper class American family; educated parents, successful working father, a stay at home mom, several siblings and a whole lot of church. Heather is a child of parents who were married in the temple before she was born. What it means to be a daughter of devout parents and a member of the larger church community of Latter Day Saints in the world enveloped Heather’s life from birth. Everything in her life was directed by and filtered through that reality. Her personal successes brought glory to God and the church. Her personal failures, shame. For the highly ambitious and sensitive like Heather, no small amount of time is spent overthinking obedience and perfection. She gave it her utmost to become the perfect Daughter of Zion.

A highly intelligent, gifted scholar with a degree from BYU but unmarried and not in a serious relationship upon graduation, she swallowed her shame and committed to go on a church mission. She was sent to France and did her utmost to serve with integrity. Upon her return to the US she met and married a disgustingly wealthy Latter Day Saint man who gave her a Porsche immediately upon becoming his wife. She was married to Mormon royalty and loved it for a very short time. Soon she discovered that she and her husband were almost nothing alike. Try as she might to stay married to him and be pleasing as his wife and mother of his children, it was impossible from her perspective. Neither wanted to deal with the reality of their marriage so for a long time they didn’t but continued to live out their lives as they always had. Over time they finally got a divorce but the cloud of shame she felt as a result still lingers to her present day.

As a single mom and ambitious entrepreneur Heather figured out how to buy and develop a med spa in partnership with a good friend. The two were savvy business women. Their work exposed them to other elite Mormon women across the Salt Lake Valley with disposable cash to invest in their lips and keep their wrinkles at bay. It’s as if the perfection of the religion spilled over into the perfection of life itself as defined by popular culture. Heather’s brain is wired to the extremes of a perfect life, a perfect faith and a perfect look. It wasn’t long before her skills at this level of perfection led to the connection with the production team from Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. It was that connection that allowed Heather to see herself outside of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints for the very first time in her life. It appears that it is the first connection she ever had to human beings who saw her actual self before seeing any other facet of her life. She was recognized for her own successes without having to share any of the credit with her church, her family or anyone else. It became so validating for her that she felt the freedom to reflect on her entire life as a Mormon woman and take a hard look at the parts of it that brought her a great deal of pain. At the end of the book she describes in detail her departure and reflects on how authentic she feels her life has become since.

I know a lot of Mormon women and I can honestly say that I have never met or been close to anyone like Heather. Though similar in devotion, the women I know are living out lives in the church very differently than she ever had the opportunity to do. The book Educated by Tara Westover is written as a Mormon departure story in a similar vein but her life in the very northern part of the Cache Valley was extremely different from Heather Gay’s. Both women found the patriarchal structure to be incompatible with their own core values and both women have departed at great cost to their relationships with friends and family. Perhaps when life is lived at the extreme end of something the weight of it breaks the back of the person carrying it the most. I think most people in religious faith live their lives somewhere in-between and as long as it works for them, they will stay and participate without any real desire to visit the shadow regions of the faith. Isn’t it like that with everyone of us in our own lives? As long as our perspectives work for us, we have no idea why we would need to upset the fruit basket and do any introspection that might lead us out of it and away from those we love and care about?

My personal faith story could be written in a memoir like this one, but unlike Heather, I wasn’t born into a devout family. My parents were dirt poor and away from both of their families. Their families were blue collar post Depression and post WWII families. A Lutheran church connection was alive in my mother’s family but not my father’s. Nothing in life could have possibly enveloped my life like the Mormon church did for Heather Gay, nothing. But here’s the deal, because I had such a weak identity within myself and within the context of a community, when I was first exposed to the Evangelical/Southern Baptist community I was quickly drawn in and enveloped my life in it all by myself.

Evangelical Doctrine, its faith and practice was very real to me because it taught me absolutes that I could adopt with certainty. It became my anchor in the turbulent world of the late 70’s and early 80’s. In the way that Mormon kids grow up knowing their place in the family, in the church and in life, Southern Baptist kids do too. I dove in head first and stayed in the Evangelical faith for 28 years. Post high school, I never imagined that I would ever leave organized religion, let alone that I would revisit everything and find my way out of it altogether. Like Heather Gay, I was ambitious and highly sensitive so I would expend no small amount of time and energy to pursue the most perfect understanding of God’s will for my life. Like her, I would build my life in accordance with my church’s teaching – for us, the Bible’s teachings. I would ignore my genuine thoughts and feelings because at the heart they were wicked and full of deceit. Any thought opposed to the church authority meant I was vulnerable to attack from Satan and I took that very literally. Thankfully, my genuine salvation in the end did not come from my church but from my marriage.

My husband is the most grounded and genuinely good person I have ever known. He and I met each other in the Evangelical parachurch ministry Campus Crusade for Christ. He was always this really nice guy I had no interest in whatsoever beyond friendship. On an outing as friends that he mistook for a date, he held my hand and threw his arm around me on a carnival ride. When I was going to set him straight a few days later he surprised me with an apology for doing both. He had me at the apology. Men had not been kind to me throughout most of my life and this one was clearly cut from a very different cloth. We remained friends but because we couldn’t seem to get enough of each other our relationship quickly deepened and soon we were talking marriage. Entirely nonphysical, we spent hours together talking about life and enjoying fudge crepes and coffee at the Village Inn restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s been over 40 years and we’re still talking, still drinking coffee and trying to find those crepes somewhere.

Our marriage hasn’t been an easy one but really, if anyone says that their’s is, I think they are possibly loading up on too many CBD gummies because relationships are hard work. In ours, I process life through my emotions long before I do so through my brain. At 62 that has changed to some degree but for the most part I still feel life long before I think it. Dean, on the other hand thinks first. We’ve had many long disagreements about things as a result but somehow in those earliest days of getting to know each other we recognized the truest self of the other and that has allowed us to get through everything else. It has allowed us to supply ample grace to one another when we are operating so unlike each other.

As Dean and I went into our early marriage, we shared a zeal to be full time Christian laborers and missionaries. Shortly after the ceremony and honeymoon, reality hit us both very hard. Student loans kept us from full time staff with the campus ministry, a first baby came along with no health insurance and in general we were entirely uncertain about our future. As creatures lost at sea, we chose to put our whole selves into the life of a church community that would provide a familiar sense of devotion and mission to our lives. This particular church was one that during my freshman year in college when I was away from home, broke away from the Southern Baptist church I loved so much and was the source of more drama than CBS, ABC or NBC could possibly have come up with at the time. Believing that their pastor had been given the one right way from God as to how to structure and organize church leadership and Christian community, they started their new church. My parents stayed and remain in the Southern Baptist church.

Two years and a whole lot of nonsense later, I was home for the summer and thought of myself as a bridge-builder and peacemaker between the two churches. I contacted a friend from high school who was there and we went out for lunch together. I felt purpose driven and strong in myself and my life ahead with Dean. I had no intention of living any of that life back at home. As I was warned by my parents that it would happen, before lunch was over, I was challenged to believe God was calling Dean and me to join my friend’s church. At the time I told her that would be a fire much too hot for me to even consider and that it would have to be really clear from God that was what we were supposed to do. I had no idea that when the door was tightly shut for us with the campus ministry we would find ourselves so far adrift and in need of those who would give us certainty that we would one day be able to fulfill our missionary calling. This church was eager to give us that certainty. We picked up everything and moved home to be a part of it.

Our families were accommodating but thought we were crazy. Everyone in our church was from a family that thought they’d gone over a cliff with religion. Of course they were right but all we knew was that these people got us and we belonged there. It would be the best and worst decision we would make as a couple. Best because we had the opportunity to raise our children near both sets of grandparents and many of their cousins. The worst, because we entirely lost sight of our own selves for the sake of the church. Our involvement was so extreme that I became so physically ill from burnout and the onset of a serious autoimmune disease that I almost died. It took years to rebuild our own lives and then our daughter began to experience severe mental illness that almost resulted in her death. In 2005 we left the town and our families behind us to try to heal. We went to Utah of all places. The reality of life in an entire state of people devoted to the man Joseph Smith and his vision was so parallel to ours in Nebraska that we found ourselves constantly gobsmacked by it. We’d been taught that the Mormon church was a cult, its members going to hell and there we were right in the middle of them all. It was the best thing ever.

It took years and much pain before the two of us would come to understand that the church we had devoted our lives to was in every way itself a cult. We’ve been deprogramming since and might just be for the rest of our lives. I don’t believe anyone finds it easy to think of their particular church in the context of having the qualities of a cult. The one thing that I think separates a healthy religious community from a toxic one is this. Control.

I found these 7 characteristics of a cult from this Atlantic Article that genuinely define the small independent church I devoted so much of my life to. Be it said, any organization that has these characteristics does not have them displayed on a framed print inside the front door. It can, and in our case, did, take close to 35 years to realize that this church met every single hallmark…and at face value it looked exactly the opposite of each one.

1. Opposing critical thinking

2. Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving

3. Emphasizing special doctrines outside scripture

4. Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders

5. Dishonoring the family unit

6. Crossing Biblical boundaries of behavior (versus sexual responsibility and personal ownership)

7. Separation from the Church

I could literally write a book on my own personal experiences that reflect every one of these 7 hallmarks of our family’s experience in this church. When you are deeply insecure inside and have devoted your life to one right way as the remedy for that insecurity, you are insanely vulnerable to life inside this kind of entity. We as human beings do not adapt to insecurity very well and it’s honestly for good reason. As humans it makes us seek safety and when we do that appropriately, it is vital for our survival. Life in this church took full advantage of my insecurities from day one and continually reinforced that the place that I would find health and happiness would only be there within that group. It took my own near death and the near death of my daughter to shake me loose from that grip. It was a horrific and painful break away that continues to be so very, very difficult.

I share all of this because in Heather Gay’s story, in Tara Westover’s story, I find kinship. Our three stories could not be more different from each other while simultaneously they could not be more exactly the same. I doubt the three of us would even know how to relate to each other should we be so fortunate as to find ourselves at the same table breaking bread, at least in the beginning. But in the end, in the end we would not see anything about each others outward appearance, life circumstances or personalities. We would simply see ourselves at home with each other. We’d be linked at the heart in a very short time.

Easter. As the year goes on and we reach the season when Christian holidays begin to be celebrated, I find myself once again coming out of an Easter funk. Overthinking, ruminating and wondering why I’m still processing my life of faith and why it’s so hard to just let go of what was and lean in to what is. It’s a bit complicated with me because as I’ve said multiple times in this blog, I was once a sold out, all/nothing, Evangelical Christian. I was a leader in ministry, a teacher in an Evangelical Christian school and couldn’t imagine any kind of life better for me. I was a devout follower of Beth Moore, Women of Faith, Focus on the Family and heavily involved in The Right to Life movement. I was devoted to the Bible as the Word of God, believed it to be literal and without error and embraced the doctrines of the churches I attended with a whole heart. I loved my life and its certainty for a very long time and never expected to depart from it. Then life happened.

In 2004 my daughter experienced a severe mental and emotional breakdown that nearly took her from us. Severe mental illness wasn’t supposed to happen in the Evangelical world, in my Evangelical world. I was encouraged to believe from the time I came to faith at 16 that if Jesus was on the throne of my life because I lived in a continual state of repentance and was filled with the Holy Spirit, my circumstances would move into alignment and I would live an abundant life. I was told that I would certainly experience tests and trials but as long as I was in surrender to God, I would be righteous and above the average person. I was in and anyone not of the Evangelical persuasion was out. Mental illness, in my world was always rooted in the person’s inability to believe the truth and therefore vulnerable to satanic oppression. It’s an absolutely horrific experience when the worldview that has held you up for most of your life proves insufficient and even worse, abusive and contributing to your child’s illness. To find yourself in a psychologist’s office desperate for help knowing that if you don’t find it there you will simply have to bury your own child. It is hands down the loneliest and most difficult place I have ever had to experience and live through.

I inched my way out of my work at the Christian school and though I remain so very grateful for those who supported me there, my daily experiences with prayers for the release of demons harassing my child, reproofs from well-intentioned believers that I had caused her illness by saying her diagnosis aloud followed by the serious wound of friend asking me if I thought she was so ill because she was just spoiled…all worked to force me out the door while she was far away in a residential treatment. I stopped all activity in any part of the institutional church and its culture, isolated myself from anyone who could potentially lob another spiritual grenade my way and made plans to move away at the end of the semester. In the years that followed, we as individuals and as a family experienced what it meant to be free to think, to reason, to ask hard questions and to live our own lives for the first time without permission from the Bible or the church. Dean and I would not have met had we not been Evangelical Christians in a campus ministry. I count my lucky stars all of the time that we were alike in our ability to face reality and ask the hard questions. It is because of that shared gift that we found a way to validate our daughter’s real lived experiences and could empower her to heal herself. At the same time, doing so required us to die to all of what brought us together in the first place. Choosing to live and create an entirely new life together is really, really hard work. The losses we have experienced will never compare to what we have gained but nonetheless, they were and are often still emotionally difficult.

When Easter arrives for me personally, I find myself incredibly drawn into the story because in so many ways, it is my story. Not to equate myself to Jesus in any kind of one and only son of God way, but to profoundly find in its details a parallel lived experience. It no longer matters to me if the resurrection was a literal experience or is a metaphorical representation of one. The impact of the imagery and its lesson is the same either way. The reality of Easter for me is entirely in the power of the story. I once held it up as literal and proof of the certainty that my religion was the one true one. I can no longer do that. What I can do is share with you the parallel as I have experienced it.

The Easter story is about a man who was born into a religious family and culture. He was loved and nurtured within that culture but was one of those kids who was way more curious and questioning than his peers. He drove the religious scholars crazy with his observations and the questions that followed. I personally do not believe the Bible as the exclusive and literal account of the life of Jesus. It wasn’t recorded in real time as no one was there with their iPhone of the day recording it as it happened. Much of what is written was done by writers recalling past events, some even decades later. The original information was at first passed along verbally and even after it was written on paper and printed, church leaders were the only ones who could read it. I think that there is enormous freedom to evaluate it without being locked into the literal/inerrant cage.

I love to read and consider Jesus’s approach to everything. Sometimes I agree with what I read and sometimes not. It is faith for me in the truest sense to approach it this way. Jesus remains the center of my religious experience because he was always able to rethink the normal and cut through all of it. In the Bible’s account of the woman brought to him caught in the act of adultery (can you imagine?) Jesus’s true colors come to light for me. Picture the scene. A whole bunch of testosterone driven humans full of religious zeal dragging this scantily clad woman to Jesus. Fired up for the opportunity to participate in her murder they seek Jesus’s affirmation only to have him say that the one’s free of sin should be the only ones to stone her. They all had to leave and he told the woman to leave and that he wasn’t there to accuse her either. That is the Jesus that makes me want to model my life after him. That is the Jesus I still follow. And Easter? Easter means a lot to me because it reflects what Father Richard Rohr describes as the paschal mystery in a daily devotional.

This is how I’m reflecting on Easter this year.

Sam Smith is a gender nonconforming person with insane theatrical talent and the singing voice to match it. He performed at The Grammy’s as the devil while a transgender woman performed with him. She was in a cage. Reflecting the lyrics of the blockbuster hit they were singing called Unholy. It was a provocative performance that had even the most devout fans shuddering. It was exactly what these people meant it to be. The reaction was immediate from the far right. It was also entirely predictable.

Ted Cruz: “This…is…evil” 

Ben Shapiro: “Satan is hot right now” meaning in popular culture, not hell 🙂

There are more by others but I will let you Google them if you want to because these really smart guys are apparently entirely unaware of the lyrics and the intent that the performance be a mirror staring back at their tribe of hypocrites. Consider the first line,

Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy

Think of the plethora of “daddy’s” out there who actually ARE doing this. It doesn’t take long and the list of “holy” men preaching, teaching and discipling others in the ways of Jesus are actually among the daddy’s getting hot at the body shop doing something unholy. Cruz and Shapiro, both very intelligent men dropped their brains and went forward only with their reactive emotion. With their angst all aglow about this performance, they don’t even realize it’s talking about those in this world who are the very ones who supported and elected Donald J. Trump. If anyone’s daddy frequented a place like Smith’s body shop, it was him. Imagine the stories Ivanka, Eric and Don Jr. could tell. The guy was a great friend with Jeffrey Epstein! Let us not forget the Matt Goetz’s of the GOP and others like him who vocally lead the moral crusade for righteousness while living very different lives themselves. Apparently, that’s all just fine as long as you don’t dress up like Satan and put on a provocative performance to showcase and expose it to the world.

The Grammy performance wasn’t about Sam Smith or Kim Petras. It was about these guys and as always they totally missed it. The fire was just too hot for them.

A lucky, lucky girl
She got married to a boy like you
She’d kick you out if she ever, ever knew
‘Bout all the – you tell me that you do
Dirty, dirty boy
You know everyone is talking on the scene
I hear them whispering ’bout the places that you’ve been
And how you don’t know how to keep your business clean

When I read these lyrics I immediately think of a guy like the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell Jr. who found nothing but open arms in the GOP. American women have endured the misogynistic paradigm of Trump and his enablers for so long that we still throw up a bit when his name is mentioned. And for the GOP intellectuals reading this… – we do not literally throw up anymore than Sam Smith is the literal devil. Think metaphor.

Sam Smith and Kim Petras MEANT to provoke. They meant to speak truth to the obscene power and its stench of hypocrisy. Art is often provocative when it embodies a truth we are otherwise unwilling to see. Sadly, those who most needed the message of Unholy missed it entirely.

Imagine with me for just a moment that Ted Cruz or Ben Shapiro and others realized what this was about. Imagine that after having seen the Grammy performance, they found themselves sobered and contrite realizing that this unholiness thrives in their midst and that they have the power to address it. Imagine that if they saw the human beings Sam Smith, Kim Petras and the others not as satanic but as the whole people they actually are instead of nonbinary and trans subhumans. It would be a different world.

Maybe someday.

When I started this blog I wanted to write about my journey to live an authentic life. I didn’t really have a plan except that it would be a place where I would write about my life and its evolution toward authenticity. I didn’t want it to be about right or wrong, left or right as much as I did about looking hard at something and finding my own truth about whatever it was. We had moved from Nebraska to Utah as a result of a major shift in how we perceived life. Our daughter’s journey to understand her life with an eating disorder and mental illness changed us. It took us away from so many illusory beliefs and practices into the heart of life and what it means to be more fully aware of its realities. We’re grateful.

It’s really no secret why psychologists, psychiatrists and those in mental health are often seen in a less than affirming light. These people get paid to ask the necessary questions that no one really wants to ask. They get paid to listen to the stories no one wants to tell and then they have to figure out how to help people deal with the answers to the questions they ask. To do that, they do something called mirroring back to the mentally ill and those involved in their lives. They take a good amount of time to collect data and observe their client’s situation. They often ask more questions to clarify if they have understood you correctly. They might present to you how that’s working for you or not and ask you to think about that. Getting real for me is the result of this process and that’s why nothing challenges me to get real like spending time alongside mentally ill people.

Last weekend I experienced some minor complications as the result of surgery I had two weeks ago that required that I see a doctor. The CareNow urgent care clinics close early on Saturday so there was nowhere else to go but the hospital ER. Because my situation involves my GI tract and is one that will almost always require a CT scan for a full assessment, I am always placed away from the main stream of ER visitors. This time I was put in a small square room with four beds, each bed surrounded by its own curtain with a large space in the middle for easy movement of beds etc. When I arrived, a sweet tempered, big burly security guard with an Eastern European accent was sitting by the entrance to the room from the hallway indicating that someone in one of the beds has the potential to be violent. On this particular night three out of the four beds in this room were taken by mentally ill patients.

Bed 1 – Deaf man who had overdosed earlier in the day and fully planned on suicide if he were discharged. He was very checked out and only wanted to sleep. I found out about his situation when the nurse did an assessment and had to use a sign language interpreter via her phone.

Bed 2 – A 30 something man I happened to see because he was on the corner opposite. I realized later that the curtain had to be open for his safety and the safety of those working with him. He was sitting up on the bed asleep when arrived so I was none the wiser to his condition at first. It remained quiet for about 15 minutes and then suddenly I heard loud sobbing. He was hallucinating and experiencing someone threatening to hurt his dog. The security guard rose to his feet and went into the room. The CNA posted at the foot of his bed gently but assertively instructed him not to yell. He responded and stopped yelling but went off into a lengthy story about a text they should read. His moods went from up to down and all around accompanied by a lot of vocalization within minutes. His ability to be present and engage with others followed those mood swings. Then as is typical with psychotic episodes, he would crash and sleep for awhile before the next one.

Bed 3 – A woman accompanied by her own law enforcement officer rested peacefully most of the time.

It was, for the most part, a typical visit to the ER for me but there was one exception. The guy in Bed 2 was visited by the doctor and told his mother would be coming in soon to see him. She arrived as planned and the little boy inside the man’s body melted into her arms and sobbed uncontrollably. His mom, like most of us with a mentally ill adult child, reminded him what to do. She had her son take deep breaths as she held him and listened to the extremes coming out of his mouth. Also like most of us, she was able to see the person behind the psychosis, the brain’s misfiring for any number of reasons and in that recognition was able to bring him to the ground for a few minutes. She wasn’t there more than five minutes but it was a vital five minutes for him and for her. As she left I looked up and saw the tears she’d held in while being there for her son begin rolling down her cheeks. The staff assisting her were so kind and there was such a sense of compassion for both patient and mother. It has been a long time since I’ve been in her shoes but in an instant I was right there with her.

It strikes me time and time again how so many who are mentally ill wrestle with the hard core paradigms they have stored inside of them from childhood and for this man and his mother, Evangelical Christianity was the third person in the room with them. When the man saw her face he immediately apologized for his sin, said he finally got what she was trying to tell him when he saw God in one of his psychotic episodes and that he always loved her. My heart broke.

We Evangelical mom’s have such a burden on our shoulders from the minute we’re pregnant we are aware that we have to make sure to train up our children in the way that they should go so that they won’t depart from it. We talk to them about Jesus as much as possible because that is the one thing we know that will keep them safe. Then, when at some point in their lives, Jesus seems incredibly absent and they are deviating from that way that they should go, we know it’s because we didn’t do it right. Our faith community knows it too and some of them flat out tell you to your face. In my case it was at the local mall where I was numbly walking around trying to breathe after taking my daughter back to the airport so she could get right back into treatment after relapsing almost the minute she walked into our front door. My woman of faith friend in her piety who saw me fake shopping thought I needed to hear and think about how it was likely that my daughter was just …” Somewhere I found the strength to tell her that she was wrong but it was an enormous emotional blow for me when I was already in dire pain. I wish I could look back and say how rare that was but it was just one of many during that year in hell.

We eventually realized that to ever heal and give our daughter any kind of chance at life, we would have to move. We moved over a thousand miles to get away. Away from the constant defense of our reality we began to find ourselves again and actually deal with what was before us. Mental illness is not rooted in Satanic possession and is not easily cured by Bible verses. The brain honestly doesn’t give a rats ass if you are saved or not. Traumatic pregnancies, premature births, fetal alcohol and drug exposure, early childhood and adult traumas all leave the brain broken and no amount of laying on of hands or exorcisms makes a bit of difference. Then there are the life is the direct result of your choices people who are 100% sure that if your mentally ill family member can learn to choose more wisely they can be cured. They are equally sure that you could have chosen better to make sure your kid didn’t end up in this state. There is truth in both but to imagine it’s possible to have a switch flipping moment in time that results in getting put back together is utterly ridiculous. Even after 22 years there are still those in my life – very much on the fringe – who still believe it was all about God and choices. They simply refuse to know.

I don’t think there is one thing that hits me harder than a mother with a child wrestling with mental illness and carrying the weight of it as her failure to train up her child. I’m so done with the religion that I once loved and the God I thought I knew. It’s fine if you never get thrown under the bus and have to deal with those who refuse to get what you’re going through apart from their rock solid paradigm. It’s why the Texas and so many Republican politicians trigger me so much. They literally refuse to know because to know means that they have to acknowledge the holes in the golden calf of modern day Evangelical/Christian Nationalism that they worship. Reality exists only in how they define it. For the most part the truth is irrelevant to them unless it fits within that paradigm and because it never does, they do so little to address the real issues behind real problems.

The God I know and believe in was sitting there with me beside these hurting people. This source of life was one full of love and mercy without any judgment. Throughout my 5 hours there various staff came by my bedside and asked if I was okay. They asked if I needed ear plugs and apologized for their other patients. I gave them back the most compassion I could muster and just said, I was fine.

Today I’m writing this because this is all part of my real life. It is also because I want those three people to know that I saw them and that I stayed with them for as long as I could. I couldn’t talk to them or make any difference except to be there and in the whole scheme of life, that is enough for me.

My personal issue is ongoing and I’ll see my surgeon tomorrow. I don’t think it’s anything serious but if it is, I will deal with it when I need to. It’s just often strange when life shows me mercy as a result of my journey. This was that and equally therapeutic.

Kevin McCarthy has finally and completely sold his soul to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives. As he boasts in his ability to finish strong and negotiate in the spirit of Democracy, like all of the proverbial frogs in the pot slowly being boiled, the life he once knew as his own is no more. He is now nothing more than a puppet connected to some very hard cable-like strings. He now holds a position of power so fragile that he will only be able to maintain it with continued bowing to the ones who demanded this compromise and that number is well beyond the twenty who directed this drama. A lot of people donated large sums of money to get him into the position and he will need to answer to them as well. These cables pulling him around could easily become tangled and make him immovable. Time will tell.

In the weeks and months to come so many ill informed people with a worldview that could fit on the head of a pin will lead committees under the banner of being godly, righteous and smart. They are instead anything but. These people are fully invested in a world that does not exist any longer. They haven’t yet realized that simply because they live in the backwoods, the rural or are isolated by their own wealth and privilege, the world at large has changed beyond its capacity to return.

Last week, my husband who works in the industry that makes sure our food is moved from one place to another, received an email from a strong voice in the industry telling his largely conservative colleagues that whether they believe global warming to be real or not is no longer relevant. He went on to say that the industry must recognize that on a global scale it is established as fact. It is going to increasingly impact their work and ability to sell products. The Japanese, for example,  are now asking for documentation as to the amount of fossil fuels used to make the products they are using. They have determined that they will show preference to those with least impact on the environment and other countries are doing the same. That’s a big deal and one that no American politician of any stripe can alter. Republicans like McCarthy cannot even begin to allow themselves to grapple with this reality without being ousted? Even as his own state of California faces an atmospheric river unlike any it has seen in his lifetime heading straight toward it, he will not mention global warming or climate change as anything but a natural event. The damage will be extensive but McCarthy will die before he assesses that any of it is due to fossil fuel induced climate change. Were he to announce even a flash of insight in that direction it would end his existence as Speaker of the House. 

I am a Reagan Republican turned Biden Democrat for more reasons than I can count but today it is because those who exist in the party now are just not able to live in reality. Whether it is because their minds are steeped in the tea made by the voices of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and others in their arena or it’s truly because they simply cannot face change, it is clear that in a very real way we are living in completely different worlds.

Focused on the perceived threat of Critical Race Theory or Drag Queens showing up to read a story in our grandchildren’s public schools, the very real national and global concerns that are having an impact on the daily life of every American are minimized or ignored altogether. All for the sake of position and power. The very real things that are changing our lives at warp speed are labeled as liberal fodder because to address them is a death sentence in the modern day GOP. As this water deluge begins to fall from the sky on saturated and in many places burn scared California soil, Kevin McCarthy will try to show empathy. He will later beg for a disaster declaration to distribute federal funds to help his people but he will not utter one word to validate climate change caused by fossil fuels. Not one word.

Rep. McCarthy is likely higher than a kite today feeling the spoils of last night’s victory. The sweet spot between his battle for the throne and the reality of being on it will be a small one. As the pretense of his everyday existence continually clashes with the real hard truths of American governance, his performance is sure to be Oscar worthy. I for one cannot imagine how the party with its own careless center will get anything accomplished but grab the popcorn and settle in because it is sure to be quite a show.

Hearing about the attack on Pelosi’s husband though abhorrent and incredibly disturbing, really should not surprise anyone.

For decades Rush Limbaugh, Dr James Dobson, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reily, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and a host of others have funneled their disgust of all things liberal toward two women. Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. These men and many more plus a lot of American far right women literally HATE them. Despise them.

Upon hearing of the attack on her husband yesterday, in the back of my mind I recalled multiple conversations around dinner tables and over coffee with friends about the danger we faced as a nation because of the “femin-Nazi” (Rush Limbaugh’s adjective used to continuously describe his most hated women leaders, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi).

As a young Evangelical Christian mom in the 80’s, daily listening to Focus on the Family to learn how to be a good Christian mother, Dr. Dobson would regularly have guests that would mention these women and the danger they posed to our country. In our church a pamphlet circulated from a charismatic Christian leader that exposed feminist women like them as those possessed by a demonic spirit called Jezebel.

We loved being separate.

We loved seeing ourselves to be exclusively enlightened.

We loved being Conservative Christian Republicans.

Then our daughter became seriously ill with an eating disorder. She was near death three times. She was suicidal. Our lives were lived with transparency in our church family. We almost lost our daughter because we had so many answers, they had so many answers.

It was almost intuitive for me to understand the connection between our religious and political life just months into our daughters treatment. It had been 14 years of living a complex life as her parents. Her premature birth made her childhood full of Dr appointments and hospital visits. Physical illnesses in the believer by default demanded inquiry into their root formation from sin, an attack from Satan or a divine gift from God, our Heavenly Father sent to teach and conform us into Christ likeness.

Eating disorders come from none of those places. They exist because the self – the soul has no place to exist. My girl was lost to her self almost at birth. There would be no redemption of that self in the toxic world of our Evangelical faith. We left it and moved away in 2005.

Nothing about what we are witnessing in our political life surprises us. No one steeped in that kind of exceptionalism and certainty can live a healthy life without perpetuating the distrust of the other. No one.

The cancer that has been and is continuing to eat our Republic alive is religious zeal that has covered over real dysfunction and abuse and emphasized controlling others in Jesus name. There were yesterday and are many more today celebrating the Pelosi’s horror right now. I know it like I’m breathing air.

Yesterday driving from Omaha to Norfolk through the most beautiful green fields of corn, soybeans and alfalfa, through small towns where time seems to have stood still I was very aware of the abundant food supply Americans depend on without even a thought about where it comes from.

Our liberal politicians rarely come from here. Biden and Harris are from the east and west coasts. Flyover states rarely get visits from anyone on the left. Trump changed that.

The people of rural America feel seen and heard in a way they haven’t experienced before. Trump’s lack of formal education works in his favor here. Not because rural American is stupid but because they must be educated differently. Biden and Harris don’t know squat about rural concerns. The Left decries the Electoral College and the two Senators for each state but without that structure this heartland wouldn’t have a voice at all. They will be heard.

In my experience Liberal values have come across here as out of touch with real life. Religious Christian practice has deep roots here – the landscape is dotted with Catholic, Lutheran and other Christian churches. Towns large and small were structured with church at the center. Trump’s supposed conversion allowed people to feel safe with him and know that they would be seen and heard. Though he’s a hollow shell part from the worship of others few knew him apart from his image of success. He was the perfect idiot for the far right to use to grab hold of the party. He did not disappoint.

The Trump Administration poured government money into rural and America. His Ag secretary told a crowd at a convention Dean was at that he always told Trump to have his checkbook out when he came to town and Trump did just that. Reinforcement is a powerful thing. But with Trump the door to the crazies opened wide up. Playing into the fears that liberals, empowered by Satan at worst and Coastal elites at best were set on changing life here, good solid caring people find themselves capable of believing utter bullshit and don’t even realize it.

An example of this is a story I heard yesterday about a situation at our local high school. I was told that a special bathroom was built there as a pet relief station for a kid who would only relieve himself like a dog. The government said he had to be accommodated. As someone who spent a bit of time in Special Education I was immediately suspicious. 🤷‍♀️

First off – ANY accommodations we need for our most difficult students in public schools require a whole lot of work to ask for and then obtain in a timely manner. Requesting a special bathroom is just not even on the list because the normal ADA requirements make our bathrooms accommodating to begin with. We have kids in wheel chairs and with walkers. We even have older kids in diapers because their bodies don’t work like normal.

Second – IF we had a student who was mentally ill to the extent that he thought he was a dog, a regular public school would likely not be the place for him. He would be in a very specialized behavioral school instead.

Third – Any professionals working with a student with this severe mental illness would not suggest building a specialized bathroom to accommodate his delusion. They would work their butts off to change his behavior and in the process clean up mess after mess. They would literally work the miraculous with great skill.

I was 100% sure that this was not true and couldn’t rest until I checked it out this story with a friend who has devoted her life to public education here. Of course it wasn’t true. The rumor came from out of state was embraced by a state legislator eager to discover such a tale and then shared with his colleagues. Believed by the masses, this nonsense required a Superintendent’s letter to the editor and the Senator to recant. Clearly, once this kind of thing gets out and is believed, a lot of people never get the real truth.

I’m aching for my home state and mad that the best of who these people are is now veiled by this version of the GOP. Lynne Cheney and Adam Kinzinger reflect what the party once was. I hope that there are others who will question everything they hear and in so doing ground themselves in their own wise minds. It has been my experience that neither side has all of the answers and in order to reach wisdom rigorous debate is essential. Believing nonsense and rigidly clinging to it on either side serves no one.

In fall of 1983 I married my best friend and partner in Evangelical Christian ministry. We had spent the entire year before our September wedding preparing to go to Uganda, East Africa, with a ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ. Our task would be to go to small remote villages and show the Jesus film a movie based on the Gospel of Luke. The process to apply, be accepted and then plan to go was incredibly rewarding and we were so eager to go together. We began to raise financial support for the trip in the spring and received hundreds of dollars from friends and family eager to see us succeed until sometime in April when the financial faucet turned off. With our time limited, we had to make a decision. We realized that we had enough money for just one of us to be able to go and determined it would be Dean.

That summer I stayed home with my family and got my old job back for the summer. Having not planned on being there I was eager to meet up with friends and one day an old high school friend and I got together for lunch and caught up. She also had a wedding that summer and as fate would have it she was marrying a good friend of Dean’s from his fraternity in Lincoln. It was a small world. Maybe I should have known that serendipity can be incredibly deceptive at times and that no matter how the stars align, they should always be put through some good scrutiny, but I didn’t know that.

Maybe I should have known that not all friendships have to be reconciled even in the Evangelical Christian world.

Maybe I should have known that what my parents and others had told me would happen if I got together with her or anyone in her church would in deed really happen.

Maybe I should have known that it is often the most insecure among us who need to feel and experience the constant reassurance that we are the most unique and special.

Maybe I should have known that when other church members were sharing stories with me of those they considered highly spiritual with degrees in finance, engineering, microbiology and medicine were choosing to leave the world’s prestige behind them and taking basic jobs just to move there to participate in the church, that the human ego can masquerade as the Holy Spirit and create loads of dysfunction.

You see, the thing about getting involved in a cult is this…you really just do not know.

platitude: remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful.

“he masks his disdain for her with platitudes about how she should believe in herself more”

We all use phrases we can utter without much thought to express ourselves. I’ve written about this before but after hitting it again a few times this week, I just have to say something. In a world of real people encountering real horrors, this platitude has never seemed more hollow.

The platitudes that grate me more than any others are those rooted in the idea that we are in and others are out. When we utter the phrase God is good and it is attached with our personal prosperity, we bear witness that we believe our beliefs are the beliefs that give us special favor. We inadvertently imply that if you aren’t getting to buy that new car, move up in your community or take that dream vacation, YOU haven’t discovered this goodness. This platitude used in this way is rooted the prosperity gospel used by people like Jim Baker and Joel Osteen. It is not, nor was it ever, used by Jesus to express that God is good.

Another way people of faith use this platitude is to encourage the poor, the struggling, the ugly, the addicts and the ill others in their midst to have hope. In spite of anything else true about their lives, they are encouraged to believe that God is good. The Christian teacher Bill Gothard took this so far as to teach that if a woman was raped, God had a plan. He went on to say that her task would be to believe so firmly in the goodness of God that being overcome and violated by a man would turn out to be good in her life!!!

Last week my son and his wife were asked to foster to adopt a third baby. While many infertile couples would give everything for one baby, they now have three! I’ve heard countless platitudes related to God’s goodness with respect to Finn’s arrival. I’ve also been living with the God is so good! ear worm going round and round in my own head. With thirty years of throwing this platitude out there like rice at a wedding, I am here to bear witness that it is way past time for us to stop it.

Saying some form of God is Good rarely, if ever, comes from any genuine grasp of a deep truth we actually know in our bones, it has instead become spiritual OxyContin used to avoid the harsh reality that God isn’t attached to any possible construct of goodness as we in first world prosperity driven religious countries can define it. In my mind and heart I can no longer just say that God is good as I express gratitude for anything in my life. I am beyond full of gratitude for these boys in my life but I cannot neglect the reality of how they have come to us. Any kind of concept that a good God would allow a mother and father to continue to conceive while not being capable of safely parenting their three boys simply does not compute.

Why? Because from where I sit, my son and his wife are the ones who are good. My country, where an imperfect foster care system exists to intervene and save the boys, that is what is good. To be high on the opioid of God is so good will not possibly work for this grandma anymore.

I actually believe in the goodness of Divine life. I believe in the co-creation with that life to make my life better. But seriously, my faith paradigm hasn’t come from prosperity, it has come as a result of personal reflection, radical acceptance and facing hard truth. It’s come from religious de-tox and self discovery. It’s come from authentic friendships where others wrestle with reality in similar fashion. I live with an abiding presence, I believe to be God but very often, very often, real goodness looks nothing at all like material or physical prosperity.

Please think about this and release your addiction to this phrase. Do it for the good of everyone.

As I approach turning 61 I think about where I’ve been, what I’ve been through and all I can say is that life is as awful as it is beautiful. I love my life but it’s been hard and I don’t say that for pity or even seeking empathy. I say it because it’s true.

Too many of us are ashamed of the hard. The fear, the insecurity and doubt that we genuinely experience. We receive so many cultural messages that tell us we get what we deserve and we know that to express any kind of weakness means we earned it.

In my Midwest hometown if you come from a very successful entrepreneurial family like I do, it’s akin to achieving royal status. As soon as you can leave the middle class neighbors and move up, things really begin to improve in your life. Then you get sick, really sick and almost die. You keep working because to rest and focus on your health means you are not taking responsibility for your life. Then one day the doctor tells you that you should never do the work you love anymore because the risk is too great. You heal up and feel better so you try it again anyway. Of course as soon as the doors shut for winter, the cold season begins and there you are, sick and using up all of your sick days. There you are creating so much work for others by your absences. And there you are quitting again.

My doctor in 1992 knew what he was talking about because he was an immunologist and infectious disease specialist. The pull up your bootstraps, get over yourself, and succeed no matter what worldview of my Conservative Midwest culture didn’t allow for people like me to have a place that was ok. Everyone tries to fix you because to have disease is not ok.

I cannot count the alternative treatments, potions and spiritually driven interventions that have come through my life in 30 years. The practitioners often built their practices because they needed access to the treatments they found helpful. Many of them have helped me a lot. Many have not.

As the pandemic arrived here and enveloped the world – so many of my friends in the alternative treatment community have embraced the idea that the miracle of the MRNA vaccine isn’t one because…when asked a few questions, only a very few have actually said that they humbly realize that the immunological, infectious disease experts actually know what they are talking about. Doctors who exclusively study Corona Viruses and what they do to our bodies are seen as charlatans and fear mongers. I’ve had such a struggle with this throughout my 61st year on this planet.

Today I realized that my doctor in 1992 knew exactly what would happen to me if I kept teaching, wiping runny noses and breathing the air in a closed classroom. His advice came from years of research and the labs tests in front of him. I was simply too proud and too devoted to my worldview to let go of my profession-also my passion. I rebranded myself as a SPED teacher and almost made it. I almost felt like I could face my successful family and community without shame. I can’t believe I am still feeling that I just missed the prescription, the one right cure and the healing. I now see it was there from the beginning. Dr. Tyler Martin, my doctor and friend gave it to me because it was the truth. I ignored it and it definitely made my life harder.

I think as I give thanks for making it this far, I will purpose to find a way to surrender. Sounds crazy perhaps but honestly, my identity has been built around this not being enough for so long that I really need to figure out how to dig deep and let go of it. I’ll never have the royal status that comes in my home culture with having money I actually earn. I’ll live in a home and enjoy a life I haven’t earned because I’m married to a successful man and the daughter of successful parents. I’m never going to be financially independent from my own effort and though I’ve known it for 30 years, my soul is entrepreneurial, my passion is endless and I really love work but I cannot.

I need to slay this shame dragon in year 62. I have to find the way to choose to accept …surrender to what is and maybe move again…JUST KIDDING!!! 🤪 I am not moving. Oy.

Having enjoyed a working relationship with the HOA Board in my suburban Texas neighborhood for two years prior to this summer, when approached to consider replacing one of the two departing members, I thought about it for awhile and decided that it was time for me to put up or shut up. I filed the necessary paperwork and became a candidate. I had no idea that this simple choice would turn into one of the most difficult of my life experiences since moving here to Texas but it did. As with most difficult things I encounter, I deal with them through writing. Having done a fair amount in my personal journals, I’m ready to put out there what the experiences taught me.

Earlier this spring the Board had announced that we as a neighborhood would need to vote on some newly updated governing documents they and another committee had been working on for some time. After the process was announced to the neighborhood, communication increased from the Board itself and among neighbors. One day I discovered a flyer on the community mailbox. There was no name or address on it, just a strongly worded instruction to READ the documents before voting and notations as to why that would be necessary. At first I ignored the flyer but when it arrived in my door with an email address on it, I sent an inquiry to the neighbor to discover what all the fuss was about. Big mistake.

What followed was a cordial dialogue for several emails and then as if out of the blue, I was told that I had drank the KoolAid, was actually just a liaison for the current Board, was a disappointment in light of what this neighbor had discovered about me online and that my brain was so compromised that I would be of no use to the neighborhood. (all my best recollection as I have deleted the conversation). I was so shocked and angry with this man’s insults that without much thought, I replied with this. ”Because of your experience in the military I am certain you can take this, F you!” Then shaking I told my husband about the conversation and asked him to read the emails. I was livid.

I am known to drop the F-bomb on occasion in private but have never, ever used the word in a conversation like this before. I just don’t do that. As a result, I was immediately filled with the most complex feelings of both intense pride at my own self defense and regret that I had actually said that to someone I don’t even know. I didn’t expect to ever think about this guy again. Wrong. More later.

Apparently I was on a roll to offend at the time because prior to the above discussion with one neighbor, I had been a participant in several discussions on our neighborhood Facebook page about the new governing documents and issues related to the process. Some of the discussions were heated and, as all social media posts can become, hurtful to some. At one point in a discussion that seemed endless, I asked another neighbor to let something go because I believed that her concerns had been acknowledged by those in the discussion and that none of us had the power do act on those concerns beyond that. It felt exhausting to keep going over the same topic.

My “instruction” was similar to pouring a cup of gas on a bed of hot coals. Boom. I had overreached and taken a position of authority over this person that I should not have. It was public and demeaning of me to do that. The next day I acknowledge that and issued a public apology on the page. I sincerely felt remorse and decide that because I did I would drop the neighbor an added personal note of apology. For me, it was how I had owned my stuff and moved on. What I did not know is that in our personal messaging between one another, somehow I only added to her pain and much to my surprise, she came to believe that I was diagnosing her with a mental illness. To say I was shocked is an understatement. Having a daughter who lives with mental illness and having worked in a treatment center for girls with mental illnesses, I was beyond mortified that my words would be interpreted in that way. But the ship, as they say, had sailed. I felt terrible. I tried to move on and hoped that at some point in the future we could talk face to face and resolve things in person. I had so much to learn.

What follows is the result of things that took place as a result of the two people I offended taking their offenses with me into the public arena. Oblivious to this I had already determined to no longer promote my candidacy for the Board position but to allow it to take its own course. I stopped interaction on social media and waited for the election to be over secretly hoping not to be elected but not sure how I would deal with a defeat either. Making mistakes and doing things we regret are hard enough but when those things are used against you without your knowledge, it is especially difficult.

Thinking that neighbor one’s email conversation with me was trivial, insignificant and private, I was completely taken back when I discovered that this man took a copy of our conversation and showed it to others even going so far as to try to convince a Board member that “someone like me did not belong on the HOA Board”. After the election was over I discovered that he had told others that I had said, “F you” to him. I couldn’t believe it was real but it was.

As if that wasn’t enough to blow me away, the woman who is certain I had diagnosed her with a mental illness posted the details of her experience with me on Facebook and told neighbors NOT to vote for me. She added that I wrote her an unsolicited snail mail letter. Seriously. 

The white male ego of men closer to my own age is something I’m so familiar with that I’m often blinded to it.  Unfortunately when the scales fall off and I’m hit with the full light of it, my response of FU is to be expected. I must learn to see it in its infancy and proceed with necessary caution. I see now that I need to be prepared to publicly call out abuse in the beginning before someone has a chance to gaslight others by crafting an alternate narrative that frames me as the abuser.

Words are powerful. Social media appears innocent, positive and a good place to discuss reality. I must learn to be more aware of the futility of beating a topic to death myself and especially to demand that another to let go of her hammer while I cling to my own.

I have learned that humans are all fragile. Regardless of military experience, intellectual prowess and skillful communication enterprises, at the end of the day we all just want validation, belonging and to be heard. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about where we are in this pandemic. Dean came home last Thursday after traveling for work with a case of breakthrough Covid-19. We’ve been in quarantine since. As fate would have it he arrived just a day after I had experienced a tense conversation with a very good friend about vaccine and I was still trying to recover from it. I love this friend as though she is my sister and I’m still not sure how to let it go and re-enter her life. The reality is that she has a very different perspective on the vaccines than I do to the point that the information she shared with me completely overwhelmed me and made feel as if I was expected to watch for the disintegration of my body as a result of the vaccine being present in it. I honestly had no idea what possible answer I could give her except to say, that of course, I must be a real idiot and will now have to live with my choice to alter my DNA, to get blood clots and a host of other things. As I don’t find that true, I didn’t know where that left me in her eyes and that was really tough. Then, just like that…my vaccinated hubs arrives from Nebraska looking like a ghost, tightness in his chest and cold-like symptoms. I knew right away that he had breakthrough Covid.

As the week has worn on and we’ve gotten used to once again being sequestered in the same house together, I’ve had ample time to reflect on this whole poop show we’ve been living through and I just started writing it out and this is the result of that reflection.

March 2020…When the World Turned Upside Down

Stephen and Theresa with their boys Bobby (just turned 2) and AJ (9 months) had lived in Cedar Park for one week. We had been helping with the move and babysitting. It was an exciting time. Stephen would no longer have the grueling 90 minute commute from South Austin to the Apple campus where he works. For the remainder of that year, Theresa would commute going south because they had found the “perfect for them” house just about 10 minutes from ours. Then…BOOM. Shut down. Having done the reverse commutes and putting the boys in their new daycare, everything about coming and going came to full stop. Everything about staying in and going ramped up to full speed. Suddenly we had Dean, Stephen and Theresa all working from home. I started to work from home too. It was crazy. 

After months of juggling and striving to get to the end of the school year, Theresa was able to stop working for the summer. Promises that it was a temporary thing were abundant. I clearly remember Jerad Kirschner saying very clearly that it would all be over by July of that year. July, however, came and went. With July also came news that Theresa had a tumor on her the L1 vertebrae very likely cancerous. Talk about feeling thrown into the abyss. I had already been watching the boys 3 days a week and she two because it was very hard for her with the backpain she was dealing with. On the days she watched them, she and Stephen would tag team while he worked. The stress level was incredible.

Dean was stuck working in our house slogging through a list of potential customers as a telemarketer instead of doing the actual kind of sales and technical advising he prefers to be doing. The threat of spinal cancer in the family took everything to an entirely new level of crazy. It is no easy swallow and clouds every damn molecule of air you are breathing as a family and this time it hit us within the context of a pandemic.  Covid 19, largely unknown even to the experts seemed to be always hanging around but unseen in the air, on surfaces and possibly elsewhere. It was seriously overwhelming. 

August rolled around and my phone rang. Stephen was calling to tell me that they had come to the realize that they had no choice but to put the boys back into daycare even though Theresa had determined that she would take a year off from teaching. She was on strict limits with lifting anything over 10lbs. so it was impossible to manage the boys alone. My immediate response was simply an affirmation that it was really the only way forward.

 We were all spent. We were all exhausted and stressed beyond the ability to give them good care and continue to pay attention to the work in front of us. Theresa’s tumor was found to be a schwannoma or nerve sheath tumor as a result of radiation she had to endure to deal with neuroblastoma she had as a toddler. It will one day require an extensive surgery but for now it’s a wait and see situation. How does a mom of two young babies and a career just stop it all in a normal stressful life, let alone during a pandemic? She spent a lot of time exercising and resting and regaining her footing after so many blows in rapid succession. In order to do that, the boys had to be in daycare out of the safety of the house, among other kids from other families in the middle of a pandemic knowing both that there was great risk if anyone caught the virus and an equally great risk if they didn’t. We were living in the proverbial rock and hard place. 

It took until February before the virus entered the daycare and when it did, it had to shut down for two weeks. We went over to Stephen’s to watch the Superbowl knowing that we could be exposed but not at all wanting to believe it. A friend suggested that kids aren’t actually transmitting the disease to others so, of course, I went to Dr. Google and found validation to that idea. When I did, we headed over and I held and coddled my boys. Days later, Bobby was positive for it. 

I was pretty frightened when I found out that he had because suddenly the abstract became real for all of us. I had long before determined that if I got the virus as a result of the boys in daycare, I would be able to accept the consequences of my choice to spend time with them. I had determined that if it took me to my end, I would go down as a hands-on grandmother. I’d caught a few colds and had my nose swabbed several times in the months prior to Bobby’s positive test but so far had avoided it. I suppose those negative tests gave me a false sense of security. Like most of us, when I want something bad enough, I can do all kinds of mental gymnastics to determine that what I want is the good and right thing for me, no matter what supposed evidence is in front of me. Unfortunately, the only thing that can break through my denial or avoidance of reality is the consequence of my choice. Bobby’s positive test was indication that I was very likely going to have to face the reality of my own battle with Covid 19. Of course, I got sick a few days later and was sure that I was Covid positive. I was not. I didn’t ever get it. That said the reality that I was exhausted from the threat of it was only magnified a hundred percent. I was determined to get vaccinated as soon as possible. 

After spending the whole month of February almost entirely separated from Stephen’s family, when I was able to get in line for the vaccine, I jumped at the chance. I had been following Dr. Michael Osterholm’s podcast every week as well as other reputable sources and had no fear at all of getting it. A friend I know in Nebraska has shared a video from our mutual friend, Dr. Tyler Martin, an infectious disease specialist. I worked for Dr. Martin in the early 90’s and after exposure to his incredibly intelligent mind and passion for immunology and infectious disease prevention, I also highly trusted him. Most of all, though, I wanted to be able to live my life without reference to Covid 19. I wanted to visit my elderly parents with pre-existing conditions, go grocery shopping without a mask and attend a live music event again. 

I had to drive out to Midland, Texas, to obtain the first dose of the Moderna vaccine. CVS had just obtained them and the slots here in Austin filled up faster than lightning. The community offered vaccinations were unavailable to me as well. I just kept trying and trying and this was the first one I was successful at getting an appointment for. I enjoyed a nice drive to west Texas and a night in a motel before heading home to experience a few days of side effect. Three weeks later, I searched again and found a follow up shot at a CVS in Palestine, Texas, three hours east of here. As spring came and mask requirements were lifted for the fully vaccinated, I was full of optimism and life started to return to normal until the end of July when my chest started to tighten and I struggled to breathe. 

Pneumonia. I could hardly believe it. I’d heard a bit on the news about breakthrough infections being diagnosed in a few places attributed to the Delta variant that had devastated India but the thought was that it was largely only found in those with underlying conditions. As one with a Mixed Connective Tissues disease, I suspected that I too had caught the Delta variant somewhere. I headed to the emergency room and was surprisingly able to get right in. In that little space on the bed near curtains pulled around me, I heard a lot of coughing, groaning and people asking questions about the virus. I heard doctors talking about lab tests, chest x-rays and how each person was being affected by Covid. One man was in the middle of cancer treatment and the virus had overwhelmed his sinuses to the point that he was experiencing excruciating headaches. Another patient could hardly talk for lack of air. All I could think to myself was, “If I do not already have Covid-19’s Delta variant, I will most certainly have it before I leave here!” 

The doctor ordered a chest x-ray and Covid test for me and we waited. I told him I was fully vaccinated and his reply was that he was too but had just come back to work after two weeks off with the Delta variant. This was the end of July. It would be just weeks and the numbers in our county would soar. The ER where I was treated would close off the entrance with caution tape and turn away patients because they were over capacity. The county health department put out bulletins letting us know we were again in the red stage. This time, however, life went on with very little disruption in public life. Then school opened. 

My daughter-in-law, thinking that the worst was behind us, had taken a new position at a local elementary school in the Special Ed department. She discovered that as a teacher in the Leander School District she would be able to put Bobby in an Early Learning Environment preschool where kids who qualify for an extra boost before Kindergarten attend. The cost would be half of what they were paying for his care at the private preschool/daycare he was in so she enrolled him. AJ would continue at the private school for another year. Three of our family members in three public schools meant that the two unvaccinated littles could potentially bring the virus home again but there was honestly nothing apart from all of us isolating in a cave to avoid the risk. Again, I determined that if I go down from Covid, this time a breakthrough case, I will go down as a full-time grandmother.  Then came the booster. 

A friend in the neighborhood posted on Facebook that she had gotten her booster and I immediately searched for an appointment. In days I had a third dose of the Moderna MRNA vaccine. It kicked my ass just like the other two so I was confident that I’d be in good shape by the time I was through. Another friend in the hood mentioned htat she was enrolled in a study with the University of Texas that would be monitoring antibody levels, both natural ones and those created by the vaccine. I did a search and enrolled as well. A few weeks later I received my results and discovered that I have >2500 vaccine antibodies in my blood stream. That is WAY over their standard measure. Armed with this data, I have been living my life since. Out of respect for others and when required, I still wear a mask if necessary but I am confident that I am protected against Covid 19.  My life goes on and I am most grateful.

This is a hard time to be alive but geez, the reality that I still am…alive, is pretty cool when I stop and think about it. I turned 60 this year and that’s saying something. I live with Mixed Connective Tissue Disease. I have also had some really crazy health scares over the decades. I have loved and hated western medicine. I have loved and hated eastern medicine. I have loved life. I have hated life. I need to write about the disease, the healing, the process and all of it. 

Autoimmune disease was suspected in my body when I was 16 and began to deal with pain in my knees and elbows for no apparent reason. A visit to the doctor, a referral to a specialist and monthly appointments for a year to rule out his suspicion of Systemic Lupus made life a bit precarious for a while. The symptoms would wax and wane and I was often sick with something but by the summer of my sophomore year I felt good enough to participate in a summer mission experience in Estes Park, Colorado. The time I spent in the mountains with fresh air, good food, plenty of exercise and a whole new group of friends seemed to suit me perfectly. When I returned home and to my doctor, I was given the good news that whatever I had was in remission and I was free to return in a year if I needed to. As a young, zealous Evangelical Christian, I was sure that God had healed me and this nastiness was behind me. 

I continued to be seriously involved in Christian ministry. It was my thing. I finished high school and went off to college only so that I could get a 4 year degree and go on staff with a mission agency I admired. I gave myself to Evangelical faith with abandon fully believing that God had an abundant plan for my life. I didn’t ever worry about or even think too much about an autoimmune disease of any kind. In 1982 Dean and I got engaged and planned to go on a mission to Uganda, East Africa. In order to go we had to submit to several required vaccinations. As we started that process, he would get a shot and barely notice it. I would get a shot and be down for a day or two. The Yellow Fever vaccine really threw me under the bus. We were raising money for the trip and all of the sudden the well dried up. 

We had just enough funds for one of us to go and I knew that it should be Dean. I am not sure if my intuition told me that I would not do well there or if it was just an acknowledgement of the fact that I was planning a wedding at the same time and it just seemed like a good idea for Dean to go without me. Either way, it was such a good decision. Dean came home having had a bout of malaria that almost took his life and most certainly would have mine. He had been taking chloroquine to keep it away but a variant of drug resistant malaria found him and he was very, very ill. 

The early eighties were days without instant communication and unreliable phone service so we didn’t even know he was sick until he came home and told us his harrowing story. He’d lost a good 25lbs and when he walked out of the gate at the airport (back in the day when family could go up and greet people after landing) I barely recognized him. He went on to have several reoccurrences with the disease until his doctor sent his bloodwork to the lab at the CDC and discovered that it was this new variant and prescribed a different medication for it. He has been malaria free since. 

There was one thing I was absolutely certain of the day Dean returned home looking like he’d spent time in a concentration camp. I knew that I had dodged a bullet that had it entered my body, it would have been a fatal blow. I was full of gratitude that I had found the strength and courage to stay behind. I have no doubt that malaria would have done me in. 

It was unfortunate for me that as Evangelical people we had to find a way to miracle-ize the story. We had to find a way to see that God kept me home and kept me alive. There is a verse in the Bible, 1 Peter 3:7 that goes like this. 

“You husbands in the same way, live with your wives in an understanding way, as with someone weaker, since she is a woman; and show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered.”

This verse is just accepted in the Evangelical kingdom as truth and this was the way we made sense of these experiences that year. The lesson to be learned was that I was a weaker vessel and Dean needed to know that in his bones. This one lesson would follow me for three decades and be a contributing factor to the exacerbation of my body’s war against itself. 

I had been in remission and able to live a very full life until March of 1985 when I had my first baby just after my 24^th birthday. The hormone changes that come with pregnancy functioned as the trigger to move my body back into battle with itself. As with all autoimmune diseases they rarely present in one full blown obvious illness. Instead the body responds to stress, biological, environmental and mental stress by triggering the inflammation response. It can begin slowly or flare up in earnest. It can affect any part of the body with connective tissue, which is pretty much all of it. After my baby was born it began to attack my bladder. Though that first year of motherhood was literally the best year of my life, I constantly dealt with some really annoying pelvic pain. I was diagnosed with interstitial cystitis, a painful condition that causes the lining of the bladder to crack and bleed and Endometriosis where the lining of the uterus goes the wrong way and attaches to tissue outside of it. The cystitis was dealt with through medication but a surgery was needed for the endometriosis.

My doctor performed a laparoscopy. With two little incisions he inserted instruments, including a camera into my abdomen and looked around. He said it looked like someone had shaken coffee grounds around my organs. He explained that cells from my uterus had gone the wrong way and that whenever I had my period, those cells did too. The result of that process was intense pain every month. He lasered these spots off and encouraged me to hope for better days ahead. He also encouraged me to consider having another baby if I wanted anymore because the endometriosis would likely return and could result in infertility. When my son was 15 months old I found out I was pregnant again. 

I cannot say that I loved being pregnant the first time until well into it. The first 6 months of that pregnancy were overwhelmingly horrible. I threw up in earnest for the first three months and then at a less intense level for another three. Finally, by Thanksgiving I was able to enjoy a meal without an abrupt exit. By March I was ready to have my baby. My long torso made it appear as though I would be having a small baby, even my doctor predicted 5-6lbs. After 18 hours of labor and a few minutes of pushing an 8lb. 1oz. beautiful little red head arrived in my arms. I was completely gone. Having Stephen was so fun that it overwhelmed all of the other nonsense. 

My second pregnancy was much less severe in terms of morning sickness but getting the baby here much more difficult. A little nausea in the morning satisfied by a few soda crackers and life went on. I worked part time in an office job and looked forward to another baby who would arrive almost two years after the first one. It was going so well in the beginning I thought that maybe I actually would end up with the four kids I’d wanted. That sense of bliss didn’t last for long because in the 13^th week everything turned upside down. On a calm weekday morning, with my son playing by himself in the living room and chattering to his toys, I sat down to read and pray for a bit. I had put the kettle on the stove for hot tea and when it reached boiling, I got up from my chair, turned to face the stove and felt a sudden gush of fluid escape from my body. As I stood there knowing my water had just broken I went into another dimension and began to work the problem.

I had a regular checkup scheduled that afternoon but knew I could not possibly wait for it. I immediately called the clinic. They wanted to see me right away so I found a sitter and went in. I have learned that memories associated with trauma are vivid and intense and as I write this, I am right there in that space in time. I was greeted by the nurse and my doctor with serious concern. It felt as if they were talking…very slowly. A sample of the fluid was looked at under the microscope. A fern like looking cell revealed that it was indeed amniotic fluid. My heart sank. My doctor grabbed his tiny little black doppler, squeezed a bit of gel on me and sought for an audible heartbeat. He found it. A strong and healthy little whishing heartbeat sound entered the acoustics of the room and a hushed silence briefly fell over us. My doctor said it was unusual to hear it so clearly so early but that it sounded very good. This was 1986 when ultrasound technology was just beginning and hearing a heartbeat was rare for mothers. It was so amazing to me. He then sent me straight up to the hospital for a visual ultrasound used only in crisis situations. I’ve rarely been so afraid.

As I laid on the table with the technician’s warm jelly all over my belly and watched as she moved her probe around, my husband standing by my side watching too, the most amazing thing occurred. This little human waved an arm past the screen revealing all five fingers and seeming to wave at us. Dean later told me that when he saw that he took it as a sign that the baby was waving to tell us she was going to make it. As human beings we find the hope where we can and that was it for that day. It was enough to get us through. 

There was no reason to admit me into the hospital that day but it was confirmed that the amniotic sac surrounded my baby had a hole in it near the top. I was sent home with the instruction to do only light house work and call the clinic if I started cramping or had any other issues arise. I now know that for my doctor and others, it was a certainty that I would miscarry. It was much later before I learned that I had actually been given a less than 1% chance of carrying a baby to term. Instead of the expected miscarriage, however, I remained pregnant for weeks. 

Fifteen weeks later, by emergency c-section, while under anesthesia because the epidural failed to numb my left side, a team of specialists in a teaching hospital where I’d been in bed for 3 weeks, delivered a 2lb. 2oz baby girl. A perfectly formed, very pink and crying baby girl. Everything about it was miraculous. Everything about it was also profoundly traumatic. I have spent the rest of my life trying to understand life lived in this kind of paradox. I have also learned that as a woman, I am not a weaker vessel. I am only an equally strong but different vessel.

I share the story of my babies’ births because the pregnancies are both so directly related to my health, to autoimmune disease and how I have processed it all throughout my life. It was pregnancy and hormones that functioned as the trigger to move me out of remission. It was figuring out how to live life as a young wife, mother and teacher that exacerbated the disease. I have enjoyed seasons of remission and horrific flare ups. Simple colds, flu and viruses have flattened me. Stressful circumstances in my life have also contributed to this reality in my life. I was on medication for several years but at present take just a thyroid medication for anything to do with autoimmunity. I have learned so much. I have lived a beautiful but hard life. 

This past summer I spent weeks meeting with a holistic dietician for issues relating to my gut health. She believes that if I can live 100% holistically, I can rid myself of autoimmune disease. I’m not certain that is possible for me. In fact, I’m pretty certain that it is not because I have other facets of my life that I value more than being 100% cured if this is the route to the cure. To change my life that drastically at 60 would take an intense focus and radical changes in several places and though I continue to make changes all of the time, I do not expect to be fully healed in my lifetime.

I have made many of my dietician’s suggested changes. I have been taking the supplements suggested in response to the lab tests she had ordered for me because they make sense to me right now.  I have found it very helpful and encouraging. At the same time, the expectation to be 100% healed comes with an awful overwhelm. It is also always and I mean it sincerely, ALWAYS shame inducing. It implies that anything less than arrival at perfection is not enough. It is NEVER enough. 

This last week I heard an OnBeing podcast discussion with Kate Bowler. I listened after my friend Jayne suggested it to me. As I sat here in my office, organizing my closet for the umpteenth time, I had it playing in the background. She said something in the discussion that broke me wide open. I don’t remember the words right now because the memory of breaking down in a heap and of feeling the flow of tears stream down my face is overwhelming my brain so that I cannot recall them. I remember just saying out loud,

I am enough. 

What I have done is enough. 

What I will do is enough. 

Whatever level of healing I obtain is enough. 

It is ENOUGH. 

I hope I can write more about how this illness has impacted my life in the days and weeks to come. After breaking open again this past week I have realized that living with Mixed Connective Tissue/Autoimmune disease has been a thread in my life for most of my life. It has also been something that has been hard to talk about sometimes. No, it’s hard to talk about all of the time because when I do, I feel like I’m standing on a stage looking at folks with loaded nerf guns pointing at me. The spongy nerf projectiles all have a cure written on them with a sharpie marker and I am supposed to catch each one and apply that cure to my body. The deal is that only if I catch and apply them ALL will I be able to be fully whole. So…if you are reading this and have such a loaded nerf gun, please refrain from shooting it if you can. I have probably heard of your cure and I have probably spent a good deal of change trying to embrace it. 

In 2004 I found treatment for my daughter’s eating disorder and mental illness. She is alive and living her best life now. I can hardly express how close we came to losing her. As a woman of deep Evangelical faith and practice, I first looked to God for guidance. When I determined to seek experts for her care, many in my circle pushed hard against me. Nonetheless, I ignored their guidance and sought to understand her illnesses instead of imagining I was going to be excluded from the suffering because I belonged to Jesus. My daughter was dying right before my eyes and the advice from the faithful was not helping.

The professionals at Children’s Hospital in Omaha helped unpack her eating disorder and discovered that her story began when my water broke at 13 weeks and my pregnancy was threatened- 15 weeks later after being in and out of the hospital – she was born viable but not without unseen major trauma to her emotional brain. In other words there were physiological reasons for her illness. It was not a lack of faith or an attack from Satan that made her ill. There were realities that I had to face if she was ever going to have a chance at a healthy adult life. Everything in our lives was touched by the hard work it took for her to reprogram her brain and learn to live with it and beyond it. I am beyond grateful for every medical and psychological expert who was there with guidance and direction because without them we would surely have buried her at 17.

I know that it’s frightening to live in a time where a rogue virus is wreaking havoc in the world. I also know that well meaning people want to believe that their faith is more powerful than the virus. I get that. If that’s where you are consider this. Sometimes it’s important to evaluate whether you are experiencing actual faith or are instead living with a conditioned presumption that you are excluded from reality because you are in and others are out. Maybe you believe that you and your community of believers have found the one right way to live and those outside of the faith have not. Think about that like I did 20 years ago.

What has too often been lost is that discovering real faith, the kind that allows us to risk something unusual and succeed requires that we pursue God with real effort, hard personal reflection and the willingness to change ourselves. I’ve been required to do some pretty significant turning around (known as repentance) before being able to gain any inspired perspective. Even then, as a human being I’m always aware that I can be more driven by my ego than any kind of genuine faith. That kind of faith in my life has come almost exclusively from places of significant brokenness.

I’ve learned that as a Christian living in a western country, I’ve had the privilege of a life lived without the threat of death from most respiratory illnesses. Pneumonia = antibiotics and IV support. H1N1 was kept at bay by a well functioning CDC with government support. Many people didn’t even know that it too could have blown up here when it hit our shores. We are used to life without threats from these diseases. We have been equally privileged to travel to foreign countries with access to vaccines for the illnesses we don’t even have here like Yellow Fever. Our freedom from these diseases has made us vulnerable to the belief that we are special and beyond the scope of these viruses. Covid 19 is proving that we are not.

It’s hard to face this. It’s hard to grasp that what you have embraced as faith might not be faith at all. It’s very hard to face what is real and find the willingness needed to alter your life. It can cost you as you move away from the life you thought you knew. Letting go of the security of a religious devotion you believed would hold you secure forever is very difficult. But if you can, trust me when I say that life lived with genuine faith grounded in the real world is way better than any life lived with a presumptive one.

We moved to Utah in January of 2005 and I have been making visits back to my home in northeast Nebraska once or twice a year since we left sixteen years ago. As much as I loved my life there and as much as my brain is full of so many great memories, very painful circumstances took me away and every return brings memories of the kind of terror that only another mother with a seriously ill and/or dying child can comprehend. Every visit forces me to respond to the reality of those experiences in the middle of the joy of seeing my family and good friends again. Every year, I process the trauma because I really cannot avoid it. Trauma is a nasty beast that holds its loaded gun in the holster waiting to pull its trigger. The slightest thing can make that happen. A drive by a familiar place, an innocent word from someone who knew me before and my heart is pounding in reaction. Thankfully, after 16 years of return visits I’ve processed it, strategized for it and most of all healed so much that this time, I was able to feel the pull of the triggers and let the bullets go right on through and out into space. It was the first visit where I did not fall into a heap of tears or have to take a long fast walk to release the energy in order to return to “normal”. I have been patting myself on the back and allowing myself to feel the joy upon my return. I.am.so.grateful.

One of the most amazing things took place after running into an acquaintance at a softball field. I hadn’t seen this friend since 2004 when her family departed for a mission in Africa. She is a beautiful, resilient woman I enjoyed chatting with as her daughter’s teacher but never really got to know. We exchanged updates and went on our way. The next day a message on Facebook Messenger arrived from her and though I wanted to reply, I knew that if I did it would have be with a true account of myself and real honestly, that can be just too much for many people. Nonetheless, I have worked to damn hard for a pretentious response indicating that I’m equal to the devoted Evangelical Christian school teacher she once knew so I replied with a very short update about my life to which she replied with a question. As I set out to reply the reality of the last time I saw her and what I was actually dealing with at the time was a clear as it has ever been. I just started writing and this is what came to me. I’ve edited out specifics but the gist is still here. I write for my own self as much as for anyone else on a similar journey who might be encouraged to hang in there.

My Reply.

When I was acquainted with you as your child’s second grade teacher, I was on my way out of the worldview that one has to accept Christ in a personal way to be saved (from Hell). I didn’t realize it then, but when H’s eating disorder was killing her and we started seeing the professionals in Omaha, the layers of our lives up to that point started to be addressed in ways that we never imagined would be necessary. At the same time they were layers of dysfunction that we ached to deal with. It was incredible to have a safe place away from home to do just that. H would talk about something that was happening in her life and often we would sit there with our chins dropped and mouths open trying to grasp how we got to that place. The therapists were so full of compassion and nonjudgmental that we found it very easy to open up and deal with things. 

H was born 3 months early after my water broke at 13 weeks, resealed and broke 3 more times. It remains a profound miracle that she is here with us. A local OB/gyn told us that we had a less than 1% chance of having a baby after the water breaks that early. It was a profound experience. It was simultaneously an experience of intense suffering for me and for my baby. Suffering that we didn’t know was actual trauma. Trauma altering the developing brain and body of my unborn baby, trauma impacting my sense of safety in the world, trauma that made our bond very difficult because it was so often interrupted by a medical crisis that would separate us and trauma that couldn’t not be dealt with by scripture or prayer alone. H had spent the first month of her life without being held…I had spent that month without holding her. I bond easily with babies and kids but the reality is that what happens in the brain to bond children to their mothers and gives them a basic sense of safety in the world was missed for H and my sense of being her mother was almost entirely a spiritual/intellectual experience instead of a human one. Her eating disorder’s genesis was in this reality. 

Even though the psychiatrist told us from the very first appointment that her eating disorder was rooted in this trauma, as I would return home and answer people’s questions about how she was doing etc. the exchanges would too often be very difficult and add to our pain. I stopped going to morning prayer with the teachers before school because trying to pray what they were praying about evil spirits and demons was so unhelpful and shaming, not to mention so far removed from my experience that I couldn’t begin to handle it. Thankfully the administrator let me out of that or I would have had to leave the job altogether. It was the most difficult time of my life. As Dean and I were being given so much grace at Children’s Hospital in Omaha, as H’s literal life was being saved and she was given back to us in a healthier place, I would come home and face incredible opposition to the truth of our situation. 

I began to shift away from church and the Christian school beyond teaching my class of students because it became a very unsafe place for me. That said, life in Conservative, pull up your boot straps and get to work Nebraska was full of obstacles in terms of ever healing from the trauma that my family needed to heal from. One reality that caused no small amount of grief was that the world was not as black and white as our faith community and home culture said it was. At face value it would seem that we could have different opinions about things but underneath there was always the search for the exact truth. Unfortunately when the only answer you want is the one right one, it becomes an overwhelming commitment to perfection. When I would share what I was learning about life being much more gray than that, it would create a lot of fear and uncertainty in those hearing me. I struggled to deal with my own growth along the way and found it increasingly problematic to discuss any of it with those in my world back in Nebraska. 

What began to happen was that we would go to Omaha for a family session and be so encouraged at H’s growth and progress, have a great discussion on the way home as we processed what we’d learned and then I would go to work the next morning. Every day was a day to arm myself and exist with caution because when I would share something we had learned, it would so threaten this worldview in the hearer that they would have to counter it. Over and over this took place and it was excruciating. I had to hold up the pretense that I was okay with the advice, the strong and repeated suggestion that H was possessed by a demonic spirit and/or just spoiled. There was no other acceptable worldview even though many just watched from afar and supported us as people, it was a brutal existence.

I am solely responsible for Hannah’s admission to Children’s Hospital back then because I was literally watching the life inside her die. I knew before God that if I did not find her genuine help somewhere she would die. She went into their program on the verge of cardiac arrest. We were within hours of losing her. Two weeks later she bled out IN treatment. Her hemoglobin was a 3.9 when they called and told us they had to admit her to the Med/Surg Unit and start her on blood transfusions. They said that she was within minutes to hours of death again. No one had any possible explanation and she was in treatment where the environment was completely controlled. So twice in three weeks, our daughter was almost dead. Those events in themselves were traumatizing for me. 

The reality is that because of my lived experiences at that time I was forced to question everything or retreat into some kind of spiritual fog that made no sense. I began to see certain people coming my way and physically turn around and walk away. A close friend gave me a book from some nut job in the deep south who had taken every illness and linked it to a spiritual cause. The author insisted that the reader use only the KJV when thinking through possible causes to an illness. It was literally the most dangerous book I’d read up to that point and ushered in no small amount of confusion. Because it came from a trusted friend I took it but that experience led to the drawing of many severe boundaries with most people because I simply could not sift through all of the nonsense, and there was A LOT of it. 

H tried to come home 3 times before the psychiatrist told us that if she did not get long term treatment in a residential facility she would die. We looked at five places and let Hannah choose the one she felt most comfortable with. That was Avalon Hills in northern Utah. That program saved her life. We gulped a bit when she chose it because it was in Utah among Mormons.  That said we both knew that we were desperate and she had to buy into the program or it would not work. We also had to make it clear that we did not go there to save Mormons or become Mormon but to find the help she needed to heal. The treatment program was secular and clients were there from all over the country. Because we did not demand that the program be Remuda Ranch in Arizona, an Evangelical treatment center, we chose to leave the pale of the Evangelical world and we have never been able to return. 

After multiple failed attempts for Hannah to return to Norfolk the only choice we had was to leave. God opened up the way for us to do that and we do not regret a thing. That said, once you have allowed yourself to leave the pale, your family and community like we did, it’s not possible to go back. 

This is the first visit since 2005 that I have been able to come to Norfolk and be entirely my own self. I have a lovely Utah wildflower tattoo on my left calf, I occasionally swear, I rarely read the Bible though much of it is stored in my brain and guides me continually, I pray in secret, I do not even consider someone unsaved or lost and I do my best to simply be fully present in the moment. I came on this trip with the intention of resisting nothing that came at me but just letting it be what it is and love people wherever they are.

As a deeply empathic person and someone who has always had a strong commitment to social justice, I see my growth as the result of the intense shadow work I had to do. Work that has allowed me to discard the beliefs that weren’t really my own to begin with. In other words, apart from abortion, I have always been a liberal-minded person and I am not living in any way inconsistent with the values that encouraged me to become an Evangelical in the first place. I’ve realized that I didn’t ever really believe in a literal or inerrant Bible but said I did because that’s what we say. I would even have said I believed it but as they say the proof is in the life we live. To live with integrity has been incredibly freeing and I can say with sincerity that few of my beliefs are fixed or set in a way that cannot be altered. My core values of love, justice and mercy are however, very fixed. 

I am deeply aware of God, the Holy Spirit/Jesus in my life but have no thought that my experience or understanding is the one and only legitimate spiritual one. I have enjoyed deep connections with Mormons, Buddhists, Muslims and others in the places where I’ve lived.  I now live in N. Austin with no desire or intent to convert people – trust me, there the Southern Baptists have that down 🙂 . My newest connection has been with a couple from India who are Jainist. Before we left Utah in 2019 we went for a bagel and coffee and met a Muslim couple who sought political asylum in the US from Turkey. Both were PhDs affiliated with Utah State University. We had just been through the bombing of an Islamic temple in Australia and the anti-muslim sentiment in Utah was significant. Dean and I did everything we could to counter that. We introduced ourselves and looked Mehmet in the eyes and said, “We are so glad you are here.”  Gonca and he became instant friends. This is the world that I inhabit and I can’t ever go back to the one I knew when you knew me. 

I know this is a long answer to your question. I really did genuinely love seeing you in person this week. I was so blessed by that evening because all of the relatives I was with have greatly struggled with my growth over the years and to be with them and be received was pure joy. Author Brene Brown says that people are harder to hate close up and I have used that as a path to stay connected to my family and some dear friends. We don’t agree on most things but love and connection at the core can’t easily be thrown out when we are present with each other. I’m so thankful. It’s been a long road. 

Wishing you all the best!! 

A year ago this week we celebrated our grandson’s 2nd birthday with friends and family. We went to a play gym, touched equipment freely and breathed in air with strangers. We had so much fun when our little guy announced, “Bobby’s Birthday!” to all of us while he waited for his daddy to light the candle on his cupcake. Pleasure chemicals released themselves in our collective brain and we all smiled with joy. We didn’t know that in just a short week, everything would change and joy would become more of a memory than a present emotion.

Daycare closed.

Work moved from office to home for the guys and from school to home for Theresa.

I was instantly living in a world inhabited by three other adults and two toddlers. It was delightful and horrible in equal measures. My husband and I had only lived here in Texas for 6 months with half of that time spent apart. Adjusting to a new place takes time and with that comes the adjustment to the new routine created by his work. His new position with Maxi Lift required that he spend 50% of his time on the road visiting customers and attending trade shows. We had just reached a place where we had found a rhythm with each other’s presence one week and its absence the next. When the shutdown arrived all of that growth was lost. Just like that we were transported to an entirely new dimension and just like that so was the entire world.

As children in elementary school we all learn about seeds and plants. Those lessons teach us the early realities of what it means for a seed to undergo the changes required to sprout, take root, grow and reach a point of fruition. We learn that life is a continual circle of life, growth and death. We come to understand that a seed’s growth requires a meeting of elements beyond itself to get the job done. Wise teachers use the plant as a metaphor of human growth and change. Most of us live our lives with this understanding completely unaware that our early childhood school experience gave it to us, we just know it’s true. What is less understood for us as human beings is that the elements out there are not always kind to growing things. Two weeks ago, here in Texas, the elements directed by Mother Nature took an already captive people into a corner and whipped it about with ice, snow and frigid temperatures in a place where furnaces running are rare and insulation around pipes even more rare. As with plants in a garden facing elements like this, lives were threatened and some actually lost because it was just too much.

Growth in 2021 has been challenged to the depths for me. It wasn’t enough to go through the snowmageddon and survive but our little Bobby whose daycare had closed again (this time for just 2 weeks at the beginning of February due to a positive Covid test in his classroom) came home from daycare…and tested positive a week later. A few days later our son Stephen tested positive. A few days later, baby AJ tested positive…and a few days later our daughter-in-law Theresa tested positive. Everyone has come through with a mild case and quarantine ends on Thursday, an entire month. We have supported from outside through drop offs and talking through screens and a lot of FaceTime calls.We’ve taken what we thought were calculated risks but when any little sore throat or cough arose went into despair until the Covid test returned negative. The mind’s ability to make one literally sick is truly profound.

Last Thursday, after my negative test, I was desperate for a vaccine. So desperate that when my neighbor encouraged me to check the CVS website and I found it available out in Midland, Texas, just 5.5 hours away, I made an appointment. Last weekend I received my first shot of the Moderna vaccine. Today, Dean is volunteering in Bell County, an hour away so that he can get a shot because he doesn’t meet the criteria here in Texas. I think he’s helping to direct traffic today. Tomorrow he’ll assist with temperature checks. Two days off of work to get vaccinated because for us, it’s worth it. We’re about done in.

A podcast I listen to called the Osterholm Update from CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) based at the University of Minnesota warns that a very difficult surge of the UK virus is on the way and yesterday The Houston Chronicle reported that every strain of the virus has been found there. Dr. O likens the reality of what is about to hit the U.S. to a Covid 19 hurricane that will bring us the worst season yet for this pandemic.

The experts say that the only way to achieve herd immunity in any reasonable amount of time is through vaccine distribution. These “experts” are infectious disease, immunology specialists and those in public health. If American’s resist the vaccine, the only alternative is to get the virus and take your chances at survival. As I take in that information, like anything else in 2021, it’s a walk through a hall of mirrors where delusional images abound and reality is only found in the knowledge that you have internalized over a lifetime. It’s profound when I hear others tell me that they aren’t putting anything like that vaccine into their body. These same people, many of whom will eat whatever they want, drink enough alcohol to persevere their liver for future generations to find in archaeological digs, smoke and take incredible risks in other ways, will not put that vaccine into their body? I say to myself, “What the incredible hell?” As if that isn’t enough, another friend told us that he’s certain Bill Gates is using the vaccine to do something nefarious to us because we know he sterilized thousands of young girls in Africa…Head spins at this “news”. As if that isn’t enough bullshit for a lifetime, my parents inform me that they were told that the government is going to be tracking them with the microscopic chip (that somehow finds its way through that vial of vaccine into the syringe and into the arm) if they get the vaccine. Thank God my mom replied with, “How can they think the government can’t find them right now if they want to?” Phew we dodged that bullet! My parents get their first shot on Friday.

It’s hard to grasp that this thing that arrived a year ago is still here, that we are all very much still dealing with it. But we are.

As I have been processing all of this in recent weeks one thing has really stood out to me. The choice to face life as it is and grow from it is the only thing that we all really have. The choice to be real – to face our fears and our own versions of crazy is what is vital to our living a full and meaningful life. I’m struggling right now. The only growth I have going on is what there is inside of me. I hope to be a different person as a result of having lived through this past year. Sunday we’re having a socially distanced birthday party for Bobby’s 3rd birthday and I’m so very grateful.

Last week while discussing the new member of Congress who believes bizarre, outlandish conspiracy theories like lasers from space operated by Jews were used to start wildfires in Northern California, a Facebook friend made this comment in response to one of my posts. The original post discussed the responsibility Evangelicals have for the rise of Trump nationalism.

“Q Anon and Evangelicalism is very simply truth vs. lies”.

I could not disagree more.

Evangelicalism is a movement, a conglomeration of anti-establishment Christians, fundamentalist believers, biblical literalists, prosperity driven charismatics and a host of others claiming Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. The Evangelical label encompasses a very, very large number of people under a very diverse tent. At the heart of the movement you will find individuals as varied in their ability to discern truth from error as you would anywhere. The concept that Evangelicalism is truth while Qanon theories are lies is, in my opinion, the greatest of all tells.

Evangelicalism in 2021 is rampant with liars. It is rampant with malignant narcissists. Evangelical males are some of the most prolific engagers in pornography and users of prostitutes in this country. Within the ranks of Evangelicals are some of the most manipulative and cunning people in this country. The number of Evangelical homes loaded with guns and ammunition is astonishing. Evangelicals spend their money on things just like anyone else and many declare their favored status with God as evidenced by the neighborhood they live in, the cars that they drive, the trips they take and a host of things other than the condition of their hearts. Evangelicals are in love with power from the top down as a result of position rather than because knowing and believing anything true has given them a following. I wish I were being overly dramatic. I am not.

Evangelical Christians as a whole honestly believed that when Donald Trump prayed aloud to receive Christ with Dr. James Dobson in 2016, they could abandon reason and support him to govern our country. Reduced to a weak Kool Aid of theology, Dr. Dobson was convinced that the Almighty, Supreme Being had entered the heart of Donald Trump and as a result would be able to miraculously guide our country to some sort of heaven on earth. Abortion would be stopped. Immigrants would be stopped. Muslims would be stopped. LGBTQ people would be stopped. Women would be put in their place and most of all the Supreme Court would become controlled by the righteous. You know, the kind, like Clarence Thomas whose wife was part of the capitol insurrection on January 6th. All very “godly” acts of faith, no?

My experiences with faith are full of mystery, serendipity and awe. God is the ground of my being and my love for Jesus Christ is sincere. The life he lived gives me an incredible beacon of light to guide my own by. I personally find it possible that he was divine and rose from the dead but at the very least it is not something I cannot actually prove. Those who claim to have evidence are doing so because they want there to be evidence. The evidence of Christ in me is a mystical, spiritual experience that makes my life better. It is not in biblical literalism, church attendance, dogma or law designed to define that life for me. I got here, to this place of my own grounded spiritual life because I challenge things and ask questions all of the time. I suppose it goes back to growing up in a family that moved six times while I was 8-13. Arriving at someone else’s doorstep, another teachers’s classroom or in a new town over and over during one’s formative years made my survival dependent upon making observations and asking questions.

In summary, Q anon has nothing on modern day Evangelical faith. Just as there are sincere people duped by the lies spread by Q and others eager for a following, Evangelicalism is full of people who have no idea how to discern truth from error anymore. It is full of dogma and law, factions and splinters of religion using the name of Christ for the ticket into the dysfunctional hall of mirrors they pretend is ultimate truth. The movement itself has provided fertile soil for Q’s theories to be planted in, to take root and to flourish in to the degree that we now have once sane grounded CHRISTIAN people claiming that Bill Gates is putting a tracking device into the Covid 19 vaccines. These same Evangelical people are willing to go without a vaccine during a worldwide pandemic because they are believing a lie. In many places Evangelical faith and Q Anon have married each other and it’s that simple.

As I write this blog post, I find myself wrestling with how to communicate what I want to say in a way that will encourage you to keep reading, especially if you are at present an active Evangelical Christian. I really, really want you to hear me because even though I am not actively involved in your world right now, my faith in God is actually very real. The core values that drive how I live my life are grounded in Jesus’s life and ministry because I spent so much of my life actively immersed in the faith. I have little certainty in the specific laws and doctrines churches have embraced but my heart has been deeply altered by the lived experiences I have had with the God of my understanding. Jesus remains the risen Christ to me and that is all I know. So, if that is enough, please continue to read. 

Recently I have been thinking a lot about words the Apostle Paul is said to have written in 2 Timothy 3. He said that when the last days would come men would be…

• Lovers of self
• Lovers of money
• Boastful 
• Arrogant 
• Revilers
• Disobedient to parents
• Ungrateful
• Unholy
• Unloving
• Irreconcilable
• Malicious gossips
• Without self control
• Brutal
• Haters of good
• Treacherous
• Reckless
• Conceited
• Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God
• Holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power

He also said to “avoid such men as these.”

I am not at all interested in a discussion of the end of the world. That’s possibly a post for another day. What I have to say is this. 

When I came into the Evangelical fold, it was vital to me to live my life in response to the ultimate goodness I found in Jesus. I was encouraged to understand that the world he inhabited and the world that he offered his followers was one with unconditional love at its foundation. I was called to live a life of devotion and service. The reality that I have encountered as time as gone by is that more and more the very ones who are propagating the message of Jesus are the ones Paul describes to Timothy, his disciple, to avoid. 

Consider the recent situation with Jerry Falwell Junior, the now ousted president of Liberty University, an institution founded on the idea of being a leader in establishing a “Moral Majority” in America. This man, who embodies every single quality listed in 2 Timothy 3 was embraced by Christian people right up until he was asked to leave.

Honestly, for those of the faith who believe the Bible is without error and literally God’s word, what is the deal? 

I could go on for days writing about the supposed leaders of the Evangelical movement who hold to the idea that they are solid, biblical Christians but live lives that are nothing at all like those required by the legit followers of Jesus. And oddly, these same leaders are the single most devoted followers of Donald J. Trump, a man who makes no effort whatsoever to hide any of his moral flaws and continues to act day after day without any regard at all as to “What Would Jesus Do?”. 

One has to ask, is it because those in the church pews Sunday after Sunday, are themselves less interested in the discipleship Jesus asked of his followers than they are in winning the praise of men like he is? Is it simply much more attractive for his followers to love money and pleasure more than they love God? Afterall, God just might ask them to sell it all and give it to the poor? One has to ask, what is the reality of the body of people across America that undergirds those in power who are so corrupt and unattached to the Jesus they claim to represent?

This incredible mystery has consumed Dean’s and my conversation for the last decade. The vitriol we witnessed being extended to the Obama family from the people of faith we once worshipped alongside was an incredible shock to us. We never imagined it possible that so many would take their contempt even further and embrace the likes of anyone like Donald Trump as God’s alternative. Watching this unfold and witnessing really, really good people choose to follow this man and his enablers has broken our hearts over and over. 

I don’t know what to do except to write. I’ve said all that I can say and then some. If these are any kind of last days – I hope that they are the last days of this incredible delusion and extreme double standard. I know it will eventually end because all malignant narcissists finally crash and burn. Unfortunately, they also take down others with them and the Evangelical Church will be no exception. I can only hope that there is some kind of redemptive life on the other side of this.

Yesterday a video clip of protestors in Michigan crossed my Facebook page and I could hardly fathom what I saw. A woman was sharing her frustration with a reporter about the horror of her gray roots showing and the inability to take care of them with a hair appointment. A man was venting his angst that the government is keeping him from getting his lawn fertilizer. I wish I could feel compassion for these people because I know that life is hard for all of us right now. Instead I feel nothing but a desire to put their sorry little asses in a Covid 19 hospital room and tell them to wake the hell up to reality. How can it be that with almost 30,000 recorded deaths and no end in sight to this pandemic that anyone can possibly imagine that these things matter? 

Later in the day I turned on CNN to get an update on things. A strong male voice, relaxed and calm but incredibly serious, was addressing his state and the American people. Governor Cuomo of New York was giving a briefing. As I listened, I was surprised at the way his words and tone of voice combined to bring much needed calm and perspective to my troubled mind. Nothing he said changed the fact that this is a horrible situation he and we, as a nation, find ourselves in.  He didn’t waste time or energy assigning blame anywhere. Instead, he made the facts crystal clear. He acknowledged that the suffering all around him is horrific. He acknowledged the human losses were increasingly unimaginable and so painful for people.  He didn’t brag about being the one able to get this bull by the horns and behind us.  Instead he just made it very clear that there is no alternative but to do what it takes to get the bull taken down by the horns and put in a pen behind us. He gave no false assurances of any kind.  I have determined he will be the voice in my head when I am thinking about this. 

Today arrived and I was made aware that my home state of Nebraska, like here in Texas, is righteously committed to the avoidance of a statewide mandate to shelter in place. The Nebraska governor says that it is not appropriate for the strong arm of government to require its citizens to comply.  It is up to individuals doing the right thing and taking responsibility.  So far, so good it seemed until this week when a packing plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, was forced to close because of an outbreak. 

As I heard the news, I was also told that the reason this outbreak occurred is because the Hispanic subculture within the state, also the primary workers at most packing plant facilities, ignored the suggestions from the governor, exercised their individual rights to gather as they saw fit and continued to celebrate their rich tradition of hosting Quinceañera celebrations. In an instant, the blame for this fell smack dab on the minorities.  I’m still trying to process the ease with which the plant and/or the government were bypassed in taking responsibility for the situation. The reality of worker proximity to one another and plant’s responsibility to do due diligence in educating its workforce wasn’t even considered in the discussion I was having. 

Packing plants are horrible places to work in. They are smelly, wet and cold. The work is ugly and physically demanding. It is amazing ANY human being would WANT to work in one. These plants rely on Hispanic and foreign workers because we white people are doing other more interesting work. The hard cold fact is that without these plants in production, there will be no meat for your BBQ, no chicken for your soup, and no turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner.  Because of this virus we will, as a society, finally be forced to understand just how valuable these hardworking packing plant workers actually are.  More importantly, we just might begin to realize exactly where our food actually comes from. 

The Bible was the spiritual text of choice when I grew up. Like many of us, my family had one and though revered as sacred, I don’t have a single memory of anyone actually opening it. I was given my paternal grandmother’s Bible with our family record of marriages, births and deaths recorded in it. I will always cherish it but I will do so with the awareness that my grandmother didn’t actually read it. Neither or she or my grandfather belonged to a church or showed any desire to participate in one.

The Bible became significant in my life as a teenager  when I committed myself to a serious search of the way to be a genuinely good person. At 16 my spoken desire was to become a TRUE Christian. Having loosely grown up in a mainline Christian denomination, I had experienced it as someone on the outside looking in rather than anyone with any real awareness of what on earth it was all about. After a hayride and bonfire on a crisp cool fall evening in Nebraska, I found myself awakened to the possibility that Christianity might be a more valuable pursuit than I had realized.  As the weeks went on I sought out more opportunities to understand this real Christianity better. My desire to live my life within its boundaries only increased and as it did, the Bible became a conduit of life to me.  As it did, church attendance and being with those of similar devotion became the center of my life.

I graduated from high school a very different person than the one I was when I started. Smoking, drinking and dabbling in rebellious pursuits were short lived once the new devotion to the Bible and Jesus took over. Honestly, I no longer needed anything like that. I felt incredibly positive much of time because I was fully aware that I was walking with the God of the Universe, the creator of the stars. In a small group designed for the leadership students of the group I studied the first chapter in the book of James.  Why the adult leaders chose that place to guide me in laying down a Christian foundation, I’ll never know, but that verse by verse, word for word study has literally given me the capacity to walk through some of the darkest of times in my life.

Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. James 1:2-4

This was literally the first scripture I memorized and chewed over and over as I lived my life. The process of doing it gave me strength and courage to walk through the experiences I had with a weird illness the doctors thought to be Lupus. I was 16 with my whole life in front of me. “Consider – stop, think about and look closely at…it-whatever it is…all – everything about you – joy…” This was my way of coping. This was the life blood of my being. Over and over the words went in my head and the promise that God was testing my faith to produce endurance and endurance would have its perfect result in my life… making me perfect, complete lacking in nothing…I am far from perfect and complete 43 years later but what I can say for sure is that as a result of this kind of effort applied to biblical study, I simply can not decide to believe that the various trials that come into my life do not work for a more perfect result in my life. AND I HAVE TRIED.

The years that followed this period of intense study led me to believe that anything and everything I would need to know or believe would be found between the covers of the Holy Bible. Understand that when I say, everything, I truly mean every single thing.

I have a cold…seek God’s word in the Bible.

I need a job…seek God’s word in the Bible.

I need/want a husband…seek God’s word in the Bible.

I need a new dress for an event and I only have X number of dollars…seek God’s word in the Bible.

I’m 13 weeks pregnant with my second baby and my water just broke…seek God’s word in the Bible.

Get the picture? The Bible was my life and as a result, prayer, spending time with other Christians, sharing a four point gospel gleaned from its pages with those who didn’t know what was in it,  also became my life.

SO MUCH GOOD.

SO MUCH.

What was less understood by myself and those who knew me well, was that underneath all of the good and all of the faith and all of the practices this life had led me to employ, was a ruthless desire to be real. That desire for authenticity and truth is for reasons I have yet to discover, completely ingrained in my DNA. I have vivid memories as a child sitting in school wondering if what I was being told was the truth and almost always would have to test the validity of things. I know we all do this but I was strangely driven. I was in trouble a lot growing up because I always pushed the envelope and had to see things for myself. I have one strong memory of sitting with my arms folded and vowing that when I grew up, I would not forget what it was like to be a kid. I was determined that adults would know that kids weren’t stupid and had things to contribute. Thus, the impetus behind becoming a teacher, I’m guessing.

As much as I loved my life of faith and practice with the Bible at its core, I was almost always dealing with the reality that something profound was amiss. Year after year, I pushed through the resistance to things that did not make sense to me. Year after year I continued to lean into being a wholehearted and devoted follower of the Bible. Bible studies, conferences, missions trips, Christian school for my profession and for my children’s education. Three years working part time in a Christian bookstore selling…Bibles and the stories written by those who traveled on the same path. I was one hundred percent saturated in all of it. THEN it came. Like a dark smoke from the mouth of hell, a force so strong came into my life, burned up everything I was, left me for dead and opened the door to an entirely new life that finally makes sense to me. It makes sense because at its core, it is simply real.

This darkness that began to overtake me wasn’t really darkness. In fact, it was just the opposite. It was a bright, white beam of increasingly intense light that slowly exposed the real darkness I had been living in for way too long. Starting with a small candle-like flame of understanding,  it grew in intensity until it became a ravaging flame of intense scrutiny that I could not escape. I had no choice but to stay put in the middle of the fire. In that place, the pages of the Bible began to burn. The structure of religion began to crumble. The relationships built to hold up a belief structure were seared beyond recognition. I had never been so lonely. Paradoxically, I had never been so aware of a God who was there with me in the intensity of the flames.

One question from a guide in the furnace changed everything for me. That question was this.

“Have you ever considered that you may need to approach the Bible in a different way?”

I. had. not.

The next time I went to my Bible, opened its pages and sought divine advice, my eyes landed on words below the title of one of the books within The Book. They simply said that this text was written in 60 AD. I looked at that and went, “What that you say?” AD…as in the year of our Lord…the day Jesus was born. Wait…the guy who wrote this, did so 60 years after Jesus was born? So why do I read it as if it was written it as it happened? Why do I read it as if it is relevant to my life today?

Understand that for me, the only possible place I would ever feel free to ask such a question and accept the answer I would come up with, would be in this intensely brutal hot place of trial. In that place, I was desperate to escape but simply could not. Any attempt to return to where I had been would only bring more pain and suffering to my situation. I had no way to go but through it.

I began to realize from the beginning of my love affair with the Bible that I had chosen to believe some things that in my situation at the time no longer made sense. The first of those things was the established belief within my faith community that all of the words in the Bible were literally dictated by God for mankind to follow. The belief is based on the following scripture from 2 Timothy 3:16

“All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;

In my life from 16 until this day in my 43 year, it was essential for me to believe that all scripture meant that all of the words in the Bible we have today from Genesis to Revelation, were literally breathed into being in the mind of the writer of the text by the God of the universe to instruct mankind. ALL of them. Every single one. This was what I believed until that day. That day the balloon popped and once it did it could never be re-inflated.

As I look at the Bible today, I see it as a group of ancient texts that began in many places as oral stories passed on to others.  Long before anything was ever written down on any kind of solid source there was no other way to pass along information gleaned from one’s experiences. Jewish scribes were tasked with writing things down but they are not responsible for the content of this version of the Bible. They were also not claiming to have been inspired but were instead the record keepers of their day. The Bible is simply not an actual recording of events as they occurred  like we have the capacity to do today. And think about it, today we can make anything look like it was a real event in real time. Imagine those coming generations who discover our trove of movies and how they will determine what is and is not true within them?

So this is me. This is my story on my journey. Today, I still believe in God and that is because I believe I have personal experiences with that God. I continue to follow the teaching of Jesus. I continue to believe that Jesus did die on the cross but I believe that it was because he assaulted religion with his teachings and his life. I am not sure I can embrace that it was to save us from original sin. As to his resurrection, I can only say that in principle, my life seems lived with cycles of death, burial and resurrection which makes me think that there is deep truth in the Easter story. I am not certain anymore and I no longer have to be.  In this place in my life – 59 freakin years old!! – I am out of that intense fire and the darkness associated with it is no more.

The Bible remains a source of deep wisdom to me. It remains a record of the encounters others had with a prophet named Jesus and how I can connect with his wisdom. I am no longer obsessed with getting it ingrained into my psyche or making sure I follow it to the letter. Today, I worship God in what I believe to be spirit and truth and attempt to love mankind as myself. That’s all that makes sense to me.

Namaste

A few days ago while I was doing my upteenth Facebook scroll of the day this post from one of my dear friends in Utah showed up. I read it and felt sad but quickly moved on. I couldn’t respond. Not one word. 

I read that she was home and okay and that was enough. I didn’t think about it at all until yesterday. When I did, I let the thought go faster than a bolt of lightning. Today when I woke up, my friend posted that so many had responded wondering how she was she wanted to let us know she was home and doing well.

Bing! The lights on in my brain. OMG, Carole was in this accident!! It could have been terrible. She could have died. OMG, I didn’t even say anything to comfort her. OMG, what’s happening to me? Because it was Carole, I told her I was so overwhelmed I didn’t really even grasp what I saw. Carole, is a friend who prefers my real over platitudes and pretense. Just want you to know that about her.

As I’ve thought about this experience, I have realized some things. As a person who has endured a number of personal losses and learned how to process them, I have a deep knowledge inside of me that gives me courage to continue. I understand at a cellular level that  just about anything can be overcome. At present, I know that the human species can overcome this…but…here’s the thing, overcoming this will involve the kind of work that those of us in industrialized countries are hell bent on avoiding.

What is making this nightmare incredibly difficult to deal with is that while we sit here in our homes with electricity flowing, lights on, refrigerators full and running, we don’t know how to imagine that when we get through this, we will do anything but return to our old lives. Simultaneously, as this crisis continues to drag on, we are collectively becoming aware of the reality that normal is just a setting on our dryer.  Whatever anyone’s normal has been, it is now gone.  And we are just beginning to realize that. We are going to be stressed out for awhile. We are going to have to figure out some things.

A few years ago, Dean’s and my world was completely shattered when we had to liquidate everything and borrow ourselves into oblivion to get our daughter treatment for a life threatening mental illness. It simultaneously included a five year battle with United Healthcare in order to make them honor the words in our family’s health insurance policy. We won but the emotional toll was profound.

Today, I’m thinking about the reality that unfathomable circumstances require unfathomable things from deep within us. Things we didn’t even imagine existed. We all know this at some level, especially if we are at all interested in history. Stories of survival are always favorite ones and give us hope. Simultaneously, they encourage us to do whatever it takes to avoid any need for such heroics. I’m here to say, the coming seasons will require us to find ourselves at the depths of ourselves.

I’m grateful today that my friend Carole knows that I am always in her corner and that it’s no big deal that I didn’t respond as I normally would have when she shared the news about her accident. I am grateful that I could process this strange experience instead of avoid it. My personal journey has taught me that any avoided experience collects in the dungeon of my soul and slowly sucks the life out of me.

My hero is Nelson Mandella. He led his people in the fight to end apartheid – white rule of the country. He endured much hell and experienced unimaginable suffering. He chose not to resist and found a well deep within to endure for his people. He survived 27 years in prison and became the President of South Africa upon his release. He left prison without bitterness and was able to see apartheid come to and end in his lifetime. He lived with these words engraved in his soul.

Roosevelt is famous for saying that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. When we are most collectively afraid, someone somewhere always quotes this. Were President Roosevelt still here with us, I would ask him a few questions about this thought because I do have a few.

• If we focus on NOT being afraid, what do you suggest we replace that fear with?
• How do we choose NOT to be afraid say, when a rogue virus we didn’t even know existed a few months ago (because it actually didn’t exist) now threatens our very own lives?
• How do we not engage in fear when one day the President claims all is well and the very next day he’s signing legislation to help the victims of the “unseen enemy” that the Democrats are making use of as a “hoax” (or something like that)?
• How do we actually be more fearful of fear than the virus itself?

First of all I don’t think you actually can avoid fear entirely. I also don’t believe that it would be healthy to do so. Fear seems to be a double edge sword. On one side fear is dangerous and creates panic. On the other side, fear becomes our greatest ally.

We are simply not afraid of many things we actually should be afraid of and what those things are is always debatable. Right now though, we know that we must allow healthy fear into our lives. When intelligent and learned health experts tell us to wash our hands repeatedly, we do it because know that if we do not, we are at risk for bringing this virus into our bodies.

The famous aviator, Howard Hughes was known to be terrified of germs and as a result developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). His rational mind found no way to escape his emotional one. He had no ability to reasonably assess his risk and whether or not to wash his hands. He was so powerfully afraid that he was compelled to wash his hands that sometimes he would scrub so hard he would injure himself. OCD is what happens when fear itself allowed to run the show.

Last night I read a Coronavirus story that shook me to my core. I visualized myself in this person’s situation and found myself overwhelmed. I am a “high risk” person with an underlying autoimmune disease and a body that’s endured a lot of traumatic injury. The very fact that I’m 59 years old and alive in 2020 is often a great, wonderful surprise to me. Much of the time I live with a river of deep gratitude underneath me because I’ve been in hot pursuit of how to live WITH myself for decades including a very intense few years with a trauma therapist. In my work with her, I discovered that the only way I could continue to live without complete existential dread was to fully FACE the reality of the life I had, the intense fear, understand why it was there, allow myself to feel it, then change my experience with it and remake my life.

Today I’m living with strong feelings of fear. To try not to feel them only makes them overwhelming. When those I care about are diagnosed with the Corona virus, I shudder at the news.

I have come to the conclusion that though, President Roosevelt meant well, fear itself is really NOT something to be fearful of. It is instead something to be acknowledged. In acknowledging my fear I allow myself to be human. I take the fear from my emotional mind and ask my rational mind to process it. Most of the time I can see the steps to take in front of me. Just taking those physical actions, like washing my hands more often and more thoroughly, releases the dread and I can continue on in a healthy way. But last night, my rational mind became my enemy. I could not stop the catastrophizing. My central nervous system was on high alert and I could literally feel a panic attack in the making. Having ridden this bull before, at 2 am I sought out those in the a cadre of teachers and healers I’ve connected with over the years. Eckhart Tolle is one of those people.

In this recent teaching Eckhardt posted on his Facebook page, I was reminded to re-engage in the present by closing my eyes and feeling my hands. Sounds super weird if you’re not familiar to it but what it literally does is allow your brain to move out of thoughts that become obsessive. Often intense fear very quickly turns into obsessive, hamster wheel spinning. Doing this one thing slows the wheel down and even allows you to get out of it.

After I did that, I was still fairly charged so I decided get a story I used to read to my students years ago and read it aloud to myself. I loved the story, it was the middle of the night and verbally engaging in the story further calmed my central nervous system down. When I finished reading I felt safe again, put my head on the pillow and was fast asleep until 7 this morning.

All any of us really possess is this moment. What’s in front of us is unknown with parts of that unknown completely out of our control. Last night, I saved myself from a panic attack. Today I am grounded and embracing what is. It’s really a very good place to have landed.

🙏🏻 Namaste

Today while doing the regular scroll through Facebook, I came upon a live feed from a Congressional hearing. The details of that hearing aren’t important for this post. What is important is that though these views reflect much of  MY own interpretations of my personal faith in Jesus, how I live and what I believe about how to treat people, I’m not sure they are appropriate for a legislative body. I had to ask myself whether or not these expressions of faith actually belong in a legal Congressional hearing.  Should the person of Jesus and the words that he said to his followers actually have anything to do with the proceedings of a secular government overseeing a pluralistic country made up of people from many different religious persuasions? Before I go on, here is what I heard spoken today. 

“I’m experiencing this hearing and I’m struggling whether I respond or launch into this question as a legislator or from the perspective of a woman of faith,”.

“… it’s very difficult to sit here and listen to arguments in the long history in this country of using scripture and weaponizing and abusing scripture to justify bigotry,” she said. “White supremacists have done it, those who justified slavery did it, those who fought against integration did it, and we’re seeing it today.”

“Sometimes, especially in this body (Congress), I feel as though if Christ himself walked through these doors and said what he said thousands of years ago, that we should love our neighbor and our enemy, that we should welcome the stranger, fight for the least of us … he would be maligned as a radical and rejected from these doors.”

“There is nothing holy about rejecting medical care of people, no matter who they are on the grounds of what their identity is; There is nothing holy about turning someone away from a hospital,”

“My faith commands me to treat Mr. Minton as holy because he is sacred, because his life is sacred, because you are not to be denied anything that I am entitled to,”

“That we are equal in the eyes of the law and we are equal — in my faith — in the eyes of the world.”

When I asked myself these questions, the answer that came to my mind was, that though faith and practice should affect an individual, in all practical reality, it should be specifically irrelevant in Congress because what a holy man or a holy book says about a person does not belong in the making of our laws and policy in an official way. If it does from the Bible, then it also does from the holy books of other people of faith.

Why did this Representative feel the need to say these words in her official capacity? In the same vein, why did the Speaker of the House recently make a point to talk openly about prayer, specifically that she prays daily for the POTUS when she was asked about it? Think about what would happen if Representative Ilan Omar dared to express any of her beliefs in this way.  OMG, the GOP would become apoplectic! At this point though, I’m expecting that because this Representative isn’t the right kind of Christian, they are freaking out anyway. 

The answer to why this is now the norm in our public discourse, especially in DC can be found in what I believe to be the founding of two Evangelical organizations in 1979 and 1983. I believe that in their righteous zeal to obey God, as they saw it, they had no real idea what they would be ushering into those places by demanding that their one right way of things become the only right way of doing them.  These people didn’t know or realize that Christianity is an ancient religion theologians have been trying to understand and implement for centuries with their own take on the accuracy and precision of it. They forgot that not ALL Christians are Evangelical ones. Actually, they didn’t forget, they assumed that if they got enough of the right kind of Christians in office, they could control the state of public affairs the way they believed to be right.  Nonevangelical Christians are not real Christians in their minds. End of story. 

The first organization I remember was called the Moral Majority and it was founded by Jerry Falwell Senior. Falwell was a Baptist minister and the president of Liberty University. Mr. Falwell was a devout Republican who believed that America was founded exclusively on Evangelical Christian principles. It was his express aim to reclaim what he believed to have been lost in the nation’s capital. Other associates across the country joined Rev. Falwell in support and many Evangelicals across the country began to follow its work. The Evangelical pulpit began to be politicized in a way it had never been before.

The next organization was established in 1983. It was called the Family Research Council. A nonprofit founded by Dr. James Dobson, Armand Nicholi Jr., George Rekers and others. In 1988, due to financial difficulties it became a part of Dr. Dobson’s Focus on the Family ministry. Gary Bauer joined the organization as its first president and its work continues to this day. The primary aim of this organization is to lobby at the national level for Christian principles with respect to faith, family and freedom.

It is my observation that these two organizations, as well as a plethora of others, including Pat Robertson’s Regent University and 700 Club, had a collective mission to make America Evangelical Christian, again.

The preachers and leaders (not historians) believed that the early settlers came to America primarily for to establish the Christian faith. They believe that the Founding Fathers were Christians and claim any view to the contrary is the result of secular humanist wrongly interpreting American history. I can say this with confidence because my husband Dean and I were devout Evangelicals committed to the collective cause.  I also taught American History in an Evangelical Christian school. I was deeply committed to this cause for almost 30 years. 

My journey into a very different worldview began with questions, a lot of them. It is now clear to me that a whole lot of people came to America for reasons other than religious freedom and the Founders were a group of men with and without faith in God and with and without religious principles. Yes, the culture was generally Christian but it was profoundly diverse. Our founders did not intend for us to be an Evangelical Christian Nation, or a Christian only nation. The government our  founders established was a government for ALL of America’s citizens.  It was never intended to reflect a specific religion of any kind. If it was, the Founding Fathers would have clearly set that out in the Constitution.

The reason this particular Representative was compelled to share what she did above, is because Evangelicals in her midst are constantly bringing the Bible into the discussion as though it were a part of the US Constitution. In essence Evangelicals have asked for it to be this way. 

The number of Evangelicals in the House and Senate who believe that they have the one true and right way to have faith in God, the one right and true way to live their lives and make others do the same, is likely the largest it has ever been. What no one committed to the agenda seemed to have seen coming was that bringing in this very specific Christian worldview, they would also bring into the political decision making exercise anyone else who claimed the Bible as a holy book. They would have to actually be confronted by others on their use of the Bible as a justification for making the laws the way they do.

What this Representative described today was a worldview established by a Jewish carpenter. It is a worldview that Evangelicals actually share with her IN THEIR CHURCH ministries and yet, simultaneously they do not believe government should do ministry. Government should control the populace is what seems to be the gist of their involvement in it. They believe that biblical mandates, especially on morality should absolutely be a part of the law of this land according to the way they perform their duties in the House and Senate. What I do not believe they thought through very well, perhaps because they didn’t really expect to succeed, is how to actually use the whole of the Bible to make laws to govern. For example, the laws, with respect to LGBT individuals  cannot be made by throwing Bible verses at one another. MANY MANY Christians do not interpret that the Bible prohibits homosexual behavior. MANY MANY Christians do not believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible or the inerrancy of the words within its pages. 

At the end of the day, WE ARE A COUNTRY OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM! There are core principles of right and wrong shared by all religions but there are atheists using rational thinking who come to similar conclusions. Religion does not belong in a government like ours. It belongs in our country because religious people live here and we need to respect their right to believe as their conscience dictates. The only time we should object is when that religion is a physical threat to others. 

The Representative who shared this today was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. AOC…I waited to say who it was because I knew some of you wouldn’t have gotten this far had you known that to begin with.

As we’re heading fast into the 2020 election season, I need to get something out there. I have been a relentless foe of this POTUS from the get go. I’ve blogged about him numerous times and daily attempt to use Facebook and Twitter to post truthful accounts of the realities we are living with since this man was elected and has attempted to lead our country.  I have simply refused to let go of just how serious I believe it is that we have elected someone like Donald J. Trump and that he is enabled to continue. I don’t think HE is actually doing the work of POTUS. I think instead, that other, more self-assured people in his orbit are.

In my opinion, the horror of a leader like Donald J. Trump is first and foremost that he has no locus of control, no center with which to govern from. I have a zillion issues with what has happened the Republican Party where I spent most of my years as an active citizen but nothing is as serious to me as this. President Trump literally has no sense of self possession. Though full of narcissistic bravado his real genuine sense of his own self is almost completely absent. In other words, when one thinks about the way healthy human beings develop, there is little there to imagine that his growth and development was healthy enough to achieve the milestones necessary to be able to direct his life based on maturely developed core values.  According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs we discover this central place of control in our lives as we begin learning from our parents and move into a place called self-actualization. (see below)

Of course, this process doesn’t begin in a sequential manner as if we’re jumping through hoops to get there. It’s more of a natural progression in a healthy person’s human development. Consider if a new baby experiences severe oxygen deprivation during birth.  That baby is likely to become a human being with little or no actualized sense of personal actualization. The person will grow and only want to be fed, to be safe, loved and to belong, but beyond that, a conscious sense of self control and self direction will be very unlikely.

I am not sure why it is true, but it is daily obvious that in spite of President Trump’s needs being met in the lower half of this triangle, the one thing he didn’t seem to reach maturity in, is the peace and security of life in his own skin. He continuously needs validation from his base and others in his circle to assure him he’s doing a great job. Do you believe that he genuinely knows that he’s done good work? That he knows he’s a smart, intelligent leader? If you do, what do you see that affirms that to be the case. Ask yourself, why he must say so out loud all of the time.

One of the most obvious conditions of someone without a developed sense of their own real self is that they are driven by the moment in an unhealthy way. They are not necessarily present in the moment, they are always, always looking for validation from others in the moment. If self assurance was an actual fluid, a person with a severe deficit would need a 24/7 IV infusion of it.

Most of us are on a journey of self possession. Knowing ourselves, understanding our core values, living self assured lives etc. is all a growth process. It has a lot to do with what happens to us from conception to the grave. There is no one size fits all approach. Some of us have had to do a whole lot of therapy to figure out why we don’t have comfort in our own skin and figure out how to grow into it.  Some of us work hard to parent our children to develop a strong sense of self in them.  When self possessed people face hard times, they look first into their own life, evaluate their own behavior, learn how to own it and how to alter it so that in the end they become better people. For whatever reasons, President Trump doesn’t know how to face his hardships in a mature way. Take a gander at his Twitter feed if you’re not convinced.  He simply cannot do it.

This is the single most important reason why I oppose this man being our POTUS. In a position like this, a self actualized person would be humble enough to seek counsel. He does not seek counsel. He seeks enablers. He does not have genuine friendships. When a relationship doesn’t hold him in high esteem and meet his deep need for validation in some way, that relationship ends. He fires anyone who opposes him. He copes with dissent through verbal abuse and mistreatment.

It is terribly sad that people reach the age of the Donald and haven’t figured out how to grow up, but more importantly, it is terribly dangerous when these people are in leadership. Cabinet members, lawyers, White House staff, a plethora of personal acquaintances and most of all the Press have been verbally beat to hell and thrown under the proverbial bus because they dared to stand up to him. Consider is this. If someone with this level of immaturity possesses our highest office  and becomes desperate enough,  what’s to say that throwing our entire country under that same bus is  beyond him?

I know that many of my Evangelical friends and family believe that if Jesus is in a person’s heart, the only self that is important is the Jesus self. The only way to growth as a human being is growth in Christ. I believe that this one things is blinding followers of Jesus to the reality that an empty soul is leading this country.  One can grow  in Bible knowledge, church attendance and/or missionary work but no one grows in Christ without facing hard truth about themselves, no one.

Luke 2:52 says, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” I strongly believe Donald J. Trump is incapable of this kind of growth and therefore, is a very dangerous man to hold the office of President in the United States of America.

Epstein, prostitution and underage sex trafficking isn’t out there in some other place. It is right here and has been for a long time. It’s interesting to me how many of us with a history of childhood sexual abuse knew at hello that 45 was very likely one of the worst offenders. We knew and felt his brand of creeper deep down in our collective soul. The night he stalked Hillary on the debate stage we felt it and wanted to throw up. We were in awe of her strength and ability to stand her ground. As he hovered, we shuddered.

Over and over again we have endured the very real PTSD symptoms that hit us out of the blue when we brush upon a sexual predator. We watch him spin one of his webs and tell a boldface lie to divert attention away from the horror of himself. As the men in our lives embraced him…and then the women in our lives did the same, we were speechless. How could they not know? How could they not see?

Many of us went straight to our therapists in tears seeking guidance during the 2016 election season. Every single day felt like someone was loading a gun and pointing it at us. It’s been a very long 3.5 years for us. Many of us have dropped out of political discourse of any kind because it’s just too damn hard. So much loss.

What our friends and families can grasp is that we can’t unknow our experiences. We can’t unfeel the gut tightening sense of danger we learned to know so well. Our rational brains couldn’t begin to grasp how someone so blatantly out there, so disgusting and dangerous could possibly be embraced by any sane voter. Then it got worse.

He did what so many like him do to put another layer of protection over his sordid life. He hooked up with “righteous” men who have also fallen in love with their own power to persuade and convince others that they are other than they appear. He became a Christian and surrounded himself with the religious…what better place to hide than in plain sight. We’ve experienced what felt like soul crushing betrayal as friends and family embraced him even going so far as to see him as God’s chosen deliverer for America. It felt like the sucker punch of all sucker punches.

At present, the daily struggle to wrap our heads around the reality in front of us continues to be no less difficult than it has ever been. Every day we continue to feel the ick that is our 45th POTUS. When this bomb dropped last week, we knew. We knew they would know each other.

Now, what we don’t know is…will it matter?

This letter was sent from Evangelical faith leader Dr. James Dobson. As a faithful listener to his program for 2 decades (80’s and 90’s), I am always somewhat interested in what he has to say. I nearly blew a gasket reading this and to you, my Evangelical friends who will likely almost blow one at my thoughts, I hope we can somehow stop telling lies about the other side and find a way to live in America with each other. I cut and pasted this letter in its entirety. The bold text is full of my thoughts on what he has said.

Dear Friends,

Several weeks ago, I was invited by White House staff to visit our southern border at McAllen, Texas, where federal agents are struggling to deal with a massive influx of poor and destitute human beings. They come in never-ending waves. Please believe me when I tell you that the media and leftist politicians have not been truthful about what is going on there. It is a human tragedy. 

The media and leftist politicians? Is this really what Dr. Dobson’s message must begin with? One visit, on one day does not equal a  complete understanding of “what is going on at the border” for anyone, anywhere at anytime. It’s a pretty LONG border with several points of entry and the situation at McCallen is just that, the situation there at McCallen.

To frame every treatis on a subject of Dr. Dobson’s choosing with “the media and leftist politicians” completely sets the reader up to understand that hundreds of journalists, camera feeds and interviews with those on the ground in multiple places along the border ARE leftist, liberal reflections. Dr. Dobson and others have said this for so long that their followers actually believe that anyone working outside of Fox News and Conservative Christian and mainstream Conservative talk radio are a plethora of things people of faith should be afraid of.

If the Bible is true and we are told that God does not give us a spirit of fear, we can be sure that Dr. Dobson and the other predominately white male leaders among him have taken on the mantle of fear promotion for themselves.

I promised the exhausted U.S. Custom and Border Patrol agents that I would go home and tell as many people as possible what I had seen “up close and personal.” Today, I am attempting to fulfill that commitment.

Clearly, were Dr. Dobson actually watching “the liberal media and listening to the leftists” he would have heard multiple reports of how exhausted these federal workers actually are. He would also have seen very similar faces like the ones he saw across the length of the border. He would also know that our President, under the direction of Stephen Miller, entertained the idea of using the military to shoot and kill those trying to cross the border – men, women or children. 

Approximately 5,500 people show up every day in districts organized along our southern U.S. border. McAllen is the site of only one of them, but it is the busiest and most besieged. The “refugees” arrive exhausted and ragged from walking hundreds of miles. Among them are large numbers of children, many of whom are unaccompanied by a caring adult. Last year, 382,000 aliens were apprehended for illegally crossing into this country and almost 100,000 of them were minors. Some of the kids have been abused along the way. Many of them carry lice, scabies or other diseases. Currently, the facility I visited is experiencing a flu epidemic, and there are no additional beds on which to lie. Some of the women have been raped. More than 70 people of all ages are sent to local hospitals daily along the southern border. Doctors and medical staff are overwhelmed by their patient load. Remember that word, “overwhelmed.” It describes every aspect of the effort to deal with the situation there.

This reality has evolved THIS YEAR and has never been the case in McCallen before. A “leftist” journalist I follow is from McClarren, Texas. On January 14, he returned home for a visit and spent time with a local journalist who has lived there for 15 years and recorded their conversation. The issue at hand was whether they needed a border wall there or not. AT THAT TIME there were no large groups of families coming in. The reporter gave a very well rounded perspective sharing thoughts from Border Patrol agents and there was no conclusion drawn at the end of the podcast. The listener was left to consider the conversation on his/her own. No condescension of POTUS just, “this is what the President wants to do, what is your perspective” I left with the assurance that my brain was quite welcome to think for itself. I don’t listen to this podcast daily, nor do I take what he says as gospel truth. He’s one of many journalists I read or listen to. 

The most heart-wrenching experience occurred during our tour of the holding area. It is a huge gym-like building consisting of dozens of fenced-in areas. Each one is crowded with detainees standing or sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on benches. They stared out at us with plaintive eyes.

Again, if he actually watched the “media” from a variety of different sources, he would actually know that we have seen many faces like this too. Thus the reason we’re saying something about it. BUT the difference is that we’ve been talking about it for at least 3 years and some of us for much longer. We’ve also been fact checking from a variety of places whether the things the President has said at a given time are true or not. 

I noticed that almost none of them were talking to each other. The children looked traumatized and frightened. Tears flooded my eyes as I stood before them. They had no toys or dolls, except for a few items bought by compassionate border patrol agents. One tiny little girl clutched something that resembled a doll bought for her by an agent. There are few provisions made to accommodate the children. The week before we were there, a delegation of agents went to meet with members of Congress, and begged them for additional money to buy Pampers, toothbrushes, and other necessities. They were turned down flat.

These meager supplies have to be purchased with the border patrol budget, which is stretched to the limit. 

If he is going to make a claim like this he needs to tell us who was in that delegation so we can do our jobs as citizens and chew their butts out. If we knew which representatives he was actually talking about here, we’d know whether or not he was talking about the leftist liberals or not, wouldn’t we? Without that knowledge and with the way this letter is set up, it’s easy to assume they were leftist liberals (insert eye roll) 

As a liberal learning about a different place along the border where several NGO’s were “turned down flat” by the Border Patrol when they showed up with Pampers, toothbrushes and other necessities, I can tell you that I am deeply disturbed about this. The BP insisted that because the law stipulates that the only items they were allowed to use had to come from federally funded sources, they wouldn’t let them in. So, who do we blame for that? Of course the law makers but when your house is burning down, you could give a rats ass about whether it’s legal to use a certain type of hose or not to fight a fire! You do what is right, period.

I sincerely doubt it’s a policy that can’t be overridden in the name of human decency – “the only way for evil to triumph is when good men do nothing”. Complex problems like this take solutions that don’t fit nicely in law books. Seriously, do BP agents really want to hold this standard and live with the stench for one thing but do they want to live with the realities like they are? Who would even prosecute their transgression if they actually took those diapers, soap, toothpaste? Seriously! There are hundreds of stories out there where cops dig into their own freakin pockets and help a citizen whether the law allows it or not. It is the insane devoted adherence to law that allowed things like apartheid and slavery to exist. Jesus really had it out with the Pharisees when they bemoaned him healing someone on the sabbath. Maybe we can stop trying to save our own hides so much and just do the right thing. I think I said that already. Oh, well. 

I then walked up to a fenced area holding many skinny young men. An agent standing beside me asked if I would like to speak to them. He offered to translate for me, to which I replied, “Please tell them that God loves them.” Then I said, “Now tell them that I love them, too.” They smiled and waved timidly. 

Telling a thin, starving man that “God loves them” without doing anything to ease his suffering in the moment seems a bit hollow and out of touch. Maybe some kind of genuine empathy would be in order. I can’t imagine it’s easy to think a loving God would allow a situation like this.  

My heart aches for these poor people. Lest I be misunderstood, let me make clear that I am among the majority of Americans who want the border to be closed to those who attempt to enter illegally. There has to be a better solution than this. Really and truly MOST Americans know that according to the law the border IS closed to those who enter illegally. Dr. Dobson and others have been saying over and over and over that we want OPEN borders as if we want people to just come in anytime they so desire. I’m not sure how any intelligent, serious thinking person could believe that.

Right now with the asylum laws as they are, the only people allowed in and especially those in this crisis situation are coming in LEGALLY. Yes, the system is overloaded but the only solution to the crisis is to change the laws allowing people to arrive at the border requesting asylum. Until then, there is nothing we can do but take care of people the way Jesus would expect us to do. We liberals are generally devout humanitarians but that does not mean that we are eager to open the borders with no scrutiny. BUT if something is spoken often enough people seem to believe what they haven’t even intellectually processed. 

I’m personally working to help my liberal friends understand the situation LEGAL refugees face here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We do not genuinely serve them well. They live in poverty regardless of education, they work in jobs we won’t do and their daily lives are too often subject to some pretty hideous verbal and physical assaults. Those of us liberals who are aware of these realities know that WE NEED REFORM. ALL of the politicians I support are liberal and all of them agree that reform is necessary.

The harsh truth is that when the POTUS is demeaning the colleagues he cannot control and treats them like his subjects instead of his co-equals in government, the onus is first on him to change his ways and bridge the divide as much as it is on them. This is a Democratic Republic…not a theocracy or dictatorship. Really, it is. One very important task Dr. Dobson could undertake instead of joining him in the rhetoric and name-calling would be to encourage him to give up Twitter. He could also actually teach him to follow Jesus instead of just enjoy his perceived ticket into heaven. 

This is America – not Republica. We liberals are in fact American citizens whether you like us or not. We will be here for as long as there is an America. There are also many, many of us who are followers of Jesus even if we don’t interpret the Bible like you do. But more importantly, every person is a human being and deserves to be treated with respect, even if they don’t deserve it. 

I have wondered, with you, why the authorities don’t just deny these refugees access to this nation. Can’t we just send them back to their places of origin? The answer I received was “No,” for reasons I will explain.

Only 10 percent of the detainees are Mexicans. This year alone, people have come to our southern border from 127 countries, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, India, China, Palestine, Albania, San Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and other nations around the world. They speak their native tongues, which means they can’t be understood by each other or the staff. What are we to do with them? The Mexican government will not take them back, and there is no place to send them. Our current laws do not permit us to repatriate them to their country of origin. This is a disaster with no solution or projected conclusion. 

Let me tell you how these desperate people come to be our responsibility. They are the lowest rung of many societies. They sell their shanties and any other possessions to scrape together $3,500 to $10,000 to pay “coyotes” to guide them. I don’t know what happens to those who can’t meet this demand. Apparently, most manage to pay the fee, and arrive penniless and profoundly needy. I was told that some of the vulnerable children are “recycled” repeatedly to help men gain entry to this country. An unknown number of these men are hardened criminals and drug runners, and they are difficult to identify. Most make their way across the border.

Here’s something else you should know. I have been under the impression that these would-be immigrants try to cross the Rio Grande River and outrun or evade the agents. That is not true of most. They come in large groups, from 100 to 400 people at a time. As I write this letter, a record 1,200 people arrived together at El Paso. The refugees quickly give themselves up to agents. That is why they have made this journey. They know they will be fed, medicated, and treated humanely, even if they are in holding areas while they are in our custody. Then they will be released on American soil. This is the system set up by a liberal Congress and judges. THIS IS A SCAPEGOAT IF EVER THERE WAS A SCAPEGOAT. Every POTUS since George Washington has had to deal with immigration during his time in office! 

It is a well-known fact that President Obama’s administration established many of these unworkable policies, and Congress is steadfastly unwilling to change them. Every effort at reform has been overridden or ignored. It is set in stone. Democrats want massive numbers of immigrants who will someday become voters. Some Republicans (YES a whole LOT of them do) support the policies because they want cheap labor for agricultural purposes. You could mention here the millions of tax payer dollars that have gone out to America’s farmers that these same workers have seen precious little of, but I digress. The border could be fixed, but there are very few in authority who seem to care. That is simply not true. History is clear that every POTUS since the founding of this country built by a plethora of immigrants who took the land away from the native people (and that really is a well known fact) has dealt with Immigration policy and reform. To blame this present situation on liberals or Obama would be as absurd as to blame it on either of the Bush Presidents or the Clintons. NOT ONE has dealt with hoards of families coming up from Central America! That is the reason these facilities are inadequate. How many border patrol agents need to say, “The facilities we have were built for single men.” Clearly we have a new problem that cannot be blamed on any one political party.

You might consider these sources if you can allow yourself to digress from your usual sources of information.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/29/bush-immigration-reform-1990-1014141

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Immigration_Reform_Act_of_2007

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Immigration_Reform_and_Immigrant_Responsibility_Act_of_1996

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_reform_in_the_United_States

Getting back to my story, our group of national faith leaders and humanitarian organizations was taken to a grassy park underneath the international bridges where the “coyotes” bring the refugees. We stood 50 feet away from them and watched as about 200 people sat on the ground. Then buses arrived to transport them to Border Control. Agents have to work fast because another group will be showing up soon, and then another and another. The would-be immigrants are taken to the center and given cursory medical exams. Then they are segregated by sex and age and placed in the fenced-in areas to be held for the next 20 days until they are processed and given a Notice to Appear. If that sounds inhumane, what would you or I do? There is simply no other place to “house” them. 

Mismanagement of the border has a long history. A federal judge years ago issued a ruling called the Flores Settlement Agreement. It is still the source of many problems. It requires that any unaccompanied alien child must be released within 72 hours. This is now the law of the land, and poor people around the world know it. A single male typically seeks to find a child and a woman to help him “game the system.” Clearly, many of these are “fake families,” but there is no documentation in Pakistani or Bangladesh to challenge their claims. Lawyers at home have told them to claim that they are fleeing from oppression or seeking asylum. They are allowed to plead their cases to judges, but there are too few of them to keep up with the volume. These people are given a court case and released. The vast majority are never seen again. Most then become “anchor babies” who are citizens with rights to bring members of their families. Others are given transportation to an American city where they disappear into the culture. 

In addition to this influx of people from places around the world steeped in poverty and despair, Senator Chuck Schumer authored and helped pass a “lottery” system, whereby winners are brought to the United States. They become permanent residents, who then begin bringing their families to our shores. Thank you, Senator. And where did your ancestors come from? Who allowed them to come to “our” shores?? They came in droves from Europe and were given free land. They became permanent residents in numbers that would make the situation at the border seem like nothing.

Senator Schumer tried to bring a solution to a problem, the House, the Senate and a President chosen by Americans signed the bill into law. A new reform has to take place in a new time in History with new facts, new problems and new complexities. Vilifying Senator Schumer – is not doing anything but allowing Dr. Dobson to vent his own frustration. He is still there and will have to be worked with so I don’t know how this is at all helpful. 

Ten years ago, 90 percent of illegals apprehended at the border were single males, mainly from Mexico. Now, more than 50 percent show up with babies and children, and 90 percent of them are from countries other than Mexico with 64 percent being family units or unaccompanied alien children. Together, they claim to be “families” and within three weeks, they will be home free in America. Is there any doubt why there have been more than half a million illegal immigrants this year alone? 

10 years ago, the world was a bit of a different place, wasn’t it? 

Before I conclude, I must tell you about the agents who have to deal with this chaos. They are compassionate men and women, sworn to uphold federal law and protect our borders. And you think that we liberals don’t care about them because our leftist media reports on the bad hombre’s among them? Interesting.

They obviously care about the detainees, and I respect them highly. They work tirelessly feeding people three times a day and providing clean clothing. They must also maintain the portable toilets in the cells. It is a never-ending task. There are only two large showers in the facility, one for males, the other for females. Their capacity is for only 20 people at a time, which is insufficient.

The border patrol agents administer this program, but most of them didn’t sign up to be caregivers. Agents were trained to patrol the border and apprehend drug runners, traffickers, smugglers, murderers, and every kind of lawbreaker. This is very dangerous work. But, please understand this: the border patrol agents are so busy caring for refugees seeking entry to the United States that they have very little time to police the borders. It is so porous that huge quantities of contraband, including all kinds of narcotics, flow into this country every day. Then it is transported northward to America’s cities to be consumed by adolescents and millennials. Lawless gangs, such as MS-13, are also pouring into the culture, making violence for inner cities a way of life. There is one more aspect to the work of the agents that you should know. They are openly hated by citizens who resent the work they do. They are routinely vilified and mocked and demonized. Their families are also subjected to ridicule. These agents need our appreciation and prayers. They have one of the most thankless jobs in America. 

The situation I have described is the reason President Donald Trump’s border wall is so urgently needed. He seems to be the only leader in America who comprehends this tragedy and is willing to address it. This is so untrue I’m not even going to bother. I will say he’s the only one in America combining his delusional reality with a very real one and trying to make America think that his border wall will solve THIS crisis. Dr. Dobson himself, though not intending to, has explained exactly why this current crisis has nothing to do with the need for the border wall. That’s another argument entirely. 

Those who oppose him do everything they can to impede his effort. Dr. Dobson of the 1980’s would have never given a guy like Trump the time of day. In fact he and others would have been all over the indiscretions, the narcissism, the infidelity, the criminal behavior, the habitual lying, heck, along with Larry Burkett they would both be going ballistic over the increase in the federal debt and the continued deficit spending under Trump. They might have even challenged his bizare and lavish lifestyle (golden toilets, anyone). Dr. Dobson was always the first to let us know if he thought Hillary or Bill were lying, remember? Now he claims that we’re opposing a habitual liar!  The same Dr. Dobson who had program after program on teaching our kids morals and values, telling how to have strong marriages and basically teaching us all things thought wholesome, now embraces a man like Donald Trump? I. don’t. get. it. 

That is why I went to the border to see the situation for myself. I came away with an array of intense emotions. Your intense emotions were geared up and ready to find validation of your already skewed worldview. First, I was profoundly grieved over the misery of thousands of people. Second, I felt a deep appreciation for those who are doing their best to help in an impossible circumstance. Third, and frankly, I was angry at the political fat cats It’s so tempting to insert  a photo of the current POTUS in right here but that’s a bit too below the belt…who have deliberately allowed this chaos to occur for political or financial gain. Oh, that is rich coming from a devout follower of the man in power gaining millions day after day for his own personal empire because now he has Jesus in his heart! They, and their friends in the fake media have told the American people that there is no crisis at the border! Shame on them all. No, shame on YOU, Dr. Dobson. Because you only get your news from sources you agree with, you are grossly misinformed.  The border wall is one topic and that topic has nothing to do with THIS present situation – and you know that. 

What I’ve told you is only a glimpse of what is occurring on the nation’s border. I don’t know what it will take to change the circumstances. I can only report that without an overhaul of the law and the allocation of resources, millions of illegal immigrants will continue flooding to this great land from around the world. Many of them have no marketable skills. They are illiterate and unhealthy. Some are violent criminals. Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation. America has been a wonderfully generous and caring country since its founding. That is our Christian nature. But in this instance, we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it. And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen. 

Thanks for letting me set the record straight. NO, you did not set a record straight. You spoke like you know the absolute truth from one day at the border and a lifetime of learning to de-Americanize anyone who thinks different from you. 

P.S. I want to conclude this disturbing account of the border situation with a suggested “action item” for the reader. There is one solution as I see it, which is for people of faith to pray for our President as he seeks to deal with this humanitarian crisis. And pray more curses on Nancy Pelosi and the other demonic liberals. He is facing enormous opposition from both political parties, the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, the judiciary, portions of agriculture, powerful lobbies, and virtually every dimension of the culture. Well, my goodness, one would think AMERICANS have issues with the pathological liar, narcissist, impulsive very ill man with mental illness-who Dr. Dobson should actually recognize being a psychologist and all. But agenda usually has more weight than reality for most of us. I know of no one with political influence besides the President who seems to care about the crisis at the border. It’s very sad that you know of so very few good people in government. Will you join us in making it a matter for concerted prayer? NO, but  I will continue to search for real facts, I will continue to pray every day for this situation and that Republicans return to sanity. 

This letter may be reproduced without change WELL that’s good to know.  and in its entirety for non-commercial and non-political purposes without prior permission from Family Talk. Copyright, 2019 Family Talk. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed in the U.S. Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk is not affiliated with Focus on the Family.

About a month ago I lost a dear friend and mentor. My friend didn’t physically die. My friend simply ended our friendship in response to a boundary I needed to put into place where conversations about food restriction, increased exercise, clothing size changes and weight loss were concerned.

It’s been difficult. It’s been easy.

It’s been painful. It’s been soothing.

I’ve felt powerless. I’ve felt empowered.

It’s been incredibly confusing. It’s been equally clear.

Paradox: when two opposites are equally true.

It is utterly impossible in our western world to live a life free from discussions about the list of things I mentioned in the first paragraph.  We are a shame driven, perfectionist culture where success is defined first and foremost by our size. Nowhere is this more evident to me than it is knowing that there are little girls as young as five talking about dieting and how much they already hate their bodies. It is everywhere and as a result, it would be utterly impossible not to have conversations with others where some kind of talk ensues about all things related to the size of our bodies. Though I have made personal choices to change the conversation around these issues, I am not unrealistic about the reality that there will be talk that is uncomfortable for me. Unfortunately, in this relationship my coping skills and/or ability to articulate with enough grace and truth early on proved sufficient to end a very special friendship.

Months ago my friend started dieting in earnest in response to a medical test indicating she was nearing Type 2 diabetes. Interestingly, I have two friends who have made similar decisions in response to this issue. My take on both has been that I love my friends and that it is really none of my business how they choose to manage their health concerns. When affirmation is sought from me, I habitually redirect the conversation to something else unless I am specifically asked what my opinion is. If a friend chooses to  engage in a conversation in response to an advocacy post I put on Facebook I freely share what I think and sometimes, often times, we agree to disagree.  My belief is simply that life is complex enough without my direct interference.

All that said, like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings after he was stabbed by the Ringwraiths sword, I will always carry the wound of having been stabbed by an eating disorder that nearly took my daughter’s life on multiple occasions. The layers of personal trauma are going to be something I will carry for the remainder of my life. These traumas have and will continue to incur a cost for me. And there will be no cost greater than the impact this reality has on my relationships. Over time and thanks to five years of intense psychotherapy, I have learned how to manage my vulnerability pretty well but there are just times when it’s necessary to part ways. I never expected this would be one of those times.

Perhaps maturity is simply coming to grips with one’s reality and choosing to allow it to be what it is. I will miss this person in my life acutely and I will always be grateful beyond words for the impact made on my life as a result of knowing her but this is my sovereign path and tonight I just needed to write about it.

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.

Just like that, I came out of my office on a Sunday morning last October after having spent time in meditation and prayer, looked at Dean and simply said, “I have to move back to Logan or I am not going to be alive much longer”. He looked at me and said, “Okay, then I’m going too.” Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? It wasn’t at all. It was the most agonizing decision I have ever made but I really was slowly losing my life and I simply reached a point of believing it to be true.

In July of last year, after taking one dose of a medication prescribed by my doctors at the Mayo Clinic, my body began to shut down and lose all of its bodily fluid. I was taken by ambulance to the hospital where within minutes I was surrounded by people trying desperately to get an IV into my body in multiple places. After all attempts proved unsuccessful, the ER doctor came in and put one in in my neck. Soon after that I was intubated and admitted to ICU.

I woke up the next morning with Dean and Hannah beside me explaining to me that I had almost died. It took me quite awhile to grasp all of this, a few months in fact. Upon discharge, I was home for a day and went back in very sick with a kidney infection. Beyond discouraged, I asked God why I was so sick and to show me what I could do to get better if I was going to continue this habit of “almost” dying.  I had the strongest impression in my mind and heart, almost audible words, telling me that I wasn’t dealing with the Undefined Connective Tissue/autoimmune Disease that I have. Instead I was dealing with severe depression that was threatening my very life. It was a bit of a lightbulb moment in that though I’d battled depression since 2012 when a series of surgeries left me with chronic pain, I didn’t realize that it had reached a much darker place.

I didn’t know what to do but I knew that I had to go after the depression with zeal or I really wasn’t going to be alive much longer. I’d already tried everything I knew possible – lots of therapy,  both physical and psychological, prayer and meditation/mindfulness practices, several online classes directed toward healing including all of Brene Brown’s classes and of course a plethora of doctors and alternative interventions. Though everything was life changing and healing to some degree, I was not getting to a place where I could sustain a reasonably healthy life. Having been on that ventilator and in Intensive Care was really the final straw because I knew that if I entered the hospital again like that, I would not come out alive.

I realized that there were two things that were basically killing me. The seasonal depression that overwhelmed me in Minnesota. Even now, all I have to do is think about being there in October and a sense of dread comes over me. Winter is LONG in Minnesota and there can be weeks with overcast skies. One year we went from March 1st to June 1st with just 15 days of sunshine.  Growing up in Nebraska and having lived here for 5 years, I’d been through long stretches of dreary days but add to that very short days and life among more trees than I even knew could possibly exist in one place and well, my brain just could not adjust. In addition to the Seasonal Affective Depressive Disorder, I had been diagnosed with PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder as a result of multiple traumatic personal events.  My central nervous system was on high alert most of the time and it was just wearing me out.

Another important piece to the puzzle of my darkness was that due to my inability to work or expend much energy involved in social events, I found myself alone A LOT. Alone to the point of isolation. As if falling from the sky, a book I was reading shared some statistics on the effects of isolation and loneliness in battling chronic illnesses. Apparently, isolation is one of the major causes of serious illness. In case after case when isolation was resolved, people’s bodies were actually able to more easily enter into a state of health that allowed for their bodies to heal. It sounded far fetched and out there but for me in the throes of it, it was spot on. After reading this information and revisiting it that Sunday morning before talking to Dean, I knew that I had to go back to a place where I had an established support system and where the association to traumatic events was absent. Thus the reason we moved back here last December.

I’m living proof that isolation really does inhibit one’s ability to heal both mentally and physically. I’m living proof that the brain is an organ like any other and when it is overused or damaged in any way, it requires care just like anything else. I’m living proof that some people just cannot live without enough sunlight even if they take Vitamin D and sit in front of special lights.

I’m still somewhat fragile, especially physically. I haven’t been able to do any real good hiking yet and that’s been a bummer but otherwise, things are going very well. I am working 5.5 hours a day 4 days a week at a Special Needs preschool and couldn’t be more eager to get to work in the morning. I LOVE it so much and though tired at the end of the day, I’m able to sleep well and ready to go the next day. I’m still pinching myself.

Last January I attended a beautiful retreat at Asilomar near Monterey California. The speaker was the poet David Whyte. I went there because his poetry was so important as I tried to find the path I was to go toward in the spring of 2016. I have listened to his OnBeing interview with Krista Tippett at least a dozen times. The following is one of the poems that was most meaningful to me.  I don’t know if I’m ready to feel the sweetness of the darkness I have been through just yet,  but one thing I do know that it has taught me. That is the deep truth of David’s words that  “anything or anyone that does not bring you alive, is too small for you”. I have learned that what those things are or who those people are, are as individual for each of us as our unique fingerprints. Through David’s poetry I very literally found the courage to pursue my own house of belonging (the name of one of his books and poems) and honestly, I am finally grateful that I didn’t die during any one of the times that I “almost” did.

A long time ago now, I came across a beautiful little book that presented four simple truths I desperately needed to hear. I was 35, a wife, mother of two and a third and fourth grade teacher. In addition to that I was leading committees, mentoring, being mentored and in a nutshell had more meetings than should ever have existed. Living in a perpetual state of anxiety was very hard on my body and 21 years later I continue to be aware of the toll those few years at warp speed took on my life. Had this book not come into my life, I’m pretty sure I would not have been able to find the resilience I needed to get through the years of chaos that followed.

The book is called Intimacy with the Almighty by Charles Swindoll, an Evangelical Free pastor from Southern California. Though I no longer consider myself an Evangelical, I continue to center my life in God.  Lots of times I feel more like an agnostic than a person of faith but more often than not I’m drawn back to an awareness of God and the mystery of faith.  The four points Swindoll focuses on in this book seem to have a universal reality as well as a specifically Christian one. I have a very close Buddhist friend who embodies all of these and has actually mentored me in them.

The heart of the message is that there are four decisions and four disciplines one must realize to enjoy “intimacy with the Almighty”. That said, these four disciplines are applicable to anyone who wants a life of depth and meaning.

The Decisions

1. to reorder one’s private world
2. to be still
3. to cultivate serenity
4. to trust the Lord completely (for those who do not believe in God, I have found that they simply do not argue with what is but accept it as it is. “It is what it is”)

The Disciplines

1. simplicity
2. silence
3. solitude
4. surrender

Now honestly, who couldn’t possibly benefit from implementing these decisions and disciplines in one’s life? Every time I pass a golf course I become aware of the reality that golf is the way for many people to find a place of silence and solitude. Even though it’s technically not a place of being alone, for most it is one of the most quiet places they have in their lives and their inner being craves both.

The reality is that life often just sucks and pressures seem to come upon us that we aren’t fully able to avoid but what I’ve come to realize is even when life is going utterly crazy, if I will simplify, get silent and alone, I will find the ability to surrender to what is. My lizard brain locked in fight or flight calms down and my logical brain finds space to make the decisions I need to make a whole lot easier. These four decisions and disciplines have literally been the foundation of my life since 1996.  If you know anything about me or my life, you know that the winds have nearly blown me/us over more than a few times. It has been and continues to be this foundation that keeps me going. I am so very thankful.

You can buy this book at used bookstores and on Amazon or you can buy anything written on Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or the Buddhist concept of Radical Acceptance if you want to explore more. Namaste.

If you are familiar with my blog posts, you are familiar with my struggle. You know that I believe that I encountered God in a profound, life-changing way as a sophomore in high school. You know that the encounter brought about a stability and focus to my life that reset the entire trajectory of my life. You also know that the experience was so profound that I embraced the Evangelical Christian faith with 100% certainty that it was the one and only way to God, the one and only way to really live, love and leave a legacy.  It would be no mistake to define me as a professional Evangelical Christian. As with any fixed identity, the break away from it is rarely ever complete. Such is the case with me.

I will never be fully free of the experiences I had as an Evangelical Christian and part of that is because at my core, I still have evidence of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. Though I rarely use the word anymore, miracles did take place in my life as a result of volitionally placing my faith in Christ shortly after my 16th birthday. At some level I will always know that I woke up to my own self in a profound way when Christ became the focus of my life.  At present, that is pretty much all that is left of the life I once knew.

The way my departure took place has a lot to do with a nasty little debate I continue to hear play out in various forums from editorials in the paper or on social media to conversations in my own living room. I’m sure I am a magnet for attracting these conversations into my world because at the slightest hint of a discussion about the Evangelical version of the Christian faith, I find myself all ears. Trying not to listen has only made things worse and had created no small amount of dissonance in my life.

Such a conversation came into world yesterday after I Googled an author that I enjoy reading. Oh.my.goodness. The links to his name were astonishing to me. One after the other, it seemed that Evangelical voices were decrying this man’s faith as heresy and declaring that he was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”. Of course, my curiosity got the better of me and I opened up a link. The bottom line to the energy behind the layers of warning for the faithful was that the author I follow does not believe that the Bible is a book that should be taken literally and without error. Not a new thing for me to encounter but having slept on it, I woke up multiple times throughout the night and found the topic on my mind this morning.

I think what disturbed me most was not that the link I was reading said negative things about a beloved author, but that the person saying these things was so certain of his/her truth that they were incapable of entertaining the reality that they could actually be wrong themselves. There wasn’t even an, “I believe The Bible to be the literal and inerrant word of God.” Instead there was the declaration that it simply is and because I am so certain that it is, I have been given permission from the almighty to be as condescending and shaming toward anyone who believes differently as I deem fit. It was such a passionate, angry, absolute commentary that in the end you actually had to wonder if the author in question should be allowed on the planet any longer. In other words, the only reality this person seemed to know was that of his own belief (which is likely the only reality any of us know, right?). He’d completely lost sight of the fact that the author I’m reading is a human being, with a rational mind who is simply on a journey of discovery and could only determine for his own self what faith actually meant to him.

I know the mind that would engage in a battle of right/wrong, all/nothing, either/or, black/white logic to dismantle a heretic to the faith. I know it well. I’ve written from that place too so I get the struggle. But here’s the deal. All of the discussions surrounding God, Jesus, the Bible or any other faith, begin and end with just that, faith. Faith is not something you can force anyone to adhere to. Even if you get them to believe whatever it is you do, it doesn’t become real until it actually does BECOME REAL specifically for them. AND that also gets tricky because, we can do and say things that we think are genuinely our own but when tested in the fires that life naturally brings our way, we may discover that we don’t genuinely believe that at all. That is what happened to me.

I always would have said that I believed that The Bible was the literal word of God. I would have told you that scripture was alive and that uttering it would get evil spirits to go away and heal all kinds of diseases. I would have told you that every single word is true and should be obeyed literally. When life’s bonfires started to overwhelm me, however, everything changed.

A significant fire came in the form of a book by a man from a southern state who had painstakingly gone through each word of The Bible and on his own had determined what the words were saying about various health problems.  My 16 year old daughter had recently been admitted to an inpatient unit for eating disorders on the verge of a heart attack. This friend was sure that this book held the key that would unlock the reason behind her disorder. I opened the book and began to read it. Immediately, I witnessed the most bizarre explanations for illness I had ever encountered. Full of blame and shame, this book was full of the author’s interpretation of the literal word of God and offered me not one solution. I shut the book and took it back to my friend immediately. I lost it and wrote a very long and angry letter to her adding that she even cease praying for me or my family. It was very much as if a nuclear bomb had landed on my neatly arranged worldview. I’ve never been the same.

I could fill a spiral notebook with one story after the other where an encounter with reality and the literal Bible didn’t make sense. As a result, I am one of the one’s that finds no difficulty in calling out Evangelical BS when I believe I see it. It’s not easy because there is the natural outcome of becoming like those I call out. It’s painfully easy to communicate as though I believe my perspective is the only right one and that just isn’t at all what I want to do.

My faith is no longer centered on absolutes or certainty because I cannot call it faith if it is. I cannot continue to have faith if I cannot continue to be a rational human being at the same time. I cannot have faith in a Bible that was written by men, that is full of contradictions that require so much work to understand in a literal way. I still have my Bible and I often live my life with insights that have come from various parts of it but it will never return to the place of it actually being God in my life. That is simply impossible now that I’ve lived the questions and had to find my own answers.

My daughter is living her own best life right now. Had I stayed put, she would not be. It is that simple.

Paradox. A word that came my way in 2004 in the middle of a family crisis. I was teaching in a private Christian school in a small rural American community when severe mental illness entered my safe secure and near perfect world. Everything I ever thought was certain and true was in question.

Our family had been meeting with a local psychologist for over year which in itself was a real stretch for us as Evangelical Christians sure of the one and only truth. The professional who had referred us to this doctor prefaced doing so with, “You guys are a strong family, you will breeze through this.” Trust me, mental illness could care less how strong or right your family’s path may be. We did not breeze through one damn thing. Instead we realized that in order for her to recover, we would have to get used to life in a hurricane and hope like hell we could find the center now and then for a break. It’s so freeing for me to add those swear words because truly, they are the only appropriate words for such a time.

As time went on and our world continued to disintegrate, I continued to find myself living in a world of opposites that were BOTH true and lifesaving. My Midwest Conservative Christian worldview took hit after hit after hit and each hit brought new life and hope to my husband and I. At times it was downright joyful to live in the place of paradox something Dickens understood well.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.       Charles Dickens

One day while visiting my daughter while she was in residential treatment, we went to a bookstore and I landed upon a book by Parker J. Palmer called The Courage to Teach. While finding much of the material speaking to my vocational interests, the concept of paradox described by Parker Palmer, hit the nail on the head and became a permanent guide for my life. In his April, 2014, OnBeing column, Parker described how the reality of paradox continues to guide him.

If I didn’t have the idea of “holding paradox” to help me understand myself and the world around me, I’d be more lost than I am! For me, holding paradox means thinking about some (but not all) things as “both-ands” instead of “either-ors.”

The personal experiences with paradox that guided me through those difficult days continues to guide me now. At the same time, staying in that place of tension can be very difficult in a world that seems to be ripping apart as the days go by. Simply for a sense of security, I find myself wanting to adopt a worldview that is full of absolutes about right or wrong. I find myself wanting someone else to tell me that everything is going to be okay. I want to adopt an all or nothing, either or perspective so desperately right now. But I cannot.

America is a country wrestling with paradox.  We are rural and urban, we are mystics and scientists, we are male and female, gay and straight, and white and colored, Christian and not. I believe that holding the tension that these opposites create is possible in this great land of ours but my experience lends me to conclude that doing so is rarely possible without some fairly intense introspection. The willingness to participate in that kind of introspection, however, seems to only come from seasons of intense suffering.

I know that I would never have considered any view other than that approved by my worldview’s black/white, all/nothing litmus test. Had I not been in the crucible created by the realities of my daughter’s mental illnesses,  I would never have been able to hold on to the reality of who I knew my daughter actually was when her brain was misfiring and responding to the depths of trauma buried within it from her very difficult time in my womb and being born 3 months early. I would not have evaluated the very real dysfunctions in my self, family, church and overall culture that were contributing to her inability to heal.

I sincerely believe that if our politics hold us captive to an either/or, all/nothing, black/white security, we will eventually self destruct as American citizens. America was an experiment and seems to remain one in 2017.  Please join me in considering that the only way through is for a deeper understanding of one’s self and the power of creatively holding the tension between opposites. Paradox.

The author Brene Brown just gets me. My guess is that she might get you too. Brene is a shame researcher. Crazy vocation if you ask me, but she’s changing the world with her research and insights. Her books, The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly and Rising Strong have been my constant companions for the last decade. Navigating the waters of a culture that is steeped in “NEVER ENOUGH” is serious business. A couple of weeks ago, the reality that I will never be enough hit me square in the face, bored a hole in my heart and threw me under the bus.

I made a comment on Facebook in response to a question someone asked about black children. My comment came from an honest place of love and honor in my soul. I was totally unprepared to experience being called out as a racist white woman. I was equally unprepared to have my one comment singled out with five others from 600 comments, put together in a screen shot and held up as a gross example of white racism. I was devastated.

If you know me, you know that racial equality is something I have been passionate about my entire life. I was a white child who grew up in a poor and multicultural neighborhood. At 13 I ended up in a community where few minorities even existed. I deeply felt the culture shock of an all white culture. As a result, I’ve been the one among my peers always reaching out to minority students. Always.

The author of the original post was a black author who described the screen shot with my purportedly racist comment among the others said she had put her post out there as an experiment. It was basically a worm on the hook to catch the unsuspecting racist white people. The real irony was that the women actually chewing my ass about what I said were WHITE! The entire exchange caught me totally unaware and though I tried my best to understand why the words I said had been taken the way they were but it only seemed to bring more damage to the conversation. Though I understood to some degree what they were addressing, I found the entire experience so difficult I chose to delete my Facebook account and start over.

Brene talks about putting ourselves out there as an act of bravery but also as an act of vulnerability. I have never really felt angst against anyone whose skin was darker than my own but on the evening of this exchange, staying true to my core values were sorely tested. I bought the author’s memoir and started reading it but my compassion for her was lacking as a result of my own pain having been so publicly shamed by her that I put it down right away. I do want to read her story and try to grasp her experiences but right now I’m not able to.

What I said that day when the world of Facebook fell apart for me was this: “they are children”.  Apparently because black children are never the center of conversations by reducing them to mere children, I was being a racist. The fact that I teach children, that I would be in BIG trouble as a teacher were I to single out any child of a certain race and draw attention to their physical appearance meant nothing. The fact that in my circle of friends there are several people of color meant nothing. The fact that I read books like Between the World and Me by black author Ta-Nehisi Coates or anything by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie meant nothing that day on Facebook.

The level of anger leveled at me by the two white women on top of the author’s singling out of my post and displaying it as an example of rampant racism made me aware of a whole world of black expectations I knew nothing about. I know that in the end, it will become an enlightening experience and I will be better for having gone through it. For now, this is my attempt to come out of the corner and process it to some degree.

What is striking to me is that Brene’s words are truer now than ever. We ARE a culture that regardless of the issue that DEMANDS perfection from each other. We demand that our truth is fully recognized and if it is not, we have no problem publicly shaming the blind, ignorant fool who dared to try to illicit a response.  The woman who tried to be of help to me was accused by the other of coddling me, “that white woman”. How is it okay for a white woman to call me one in condescension? What was more difficult was that her response to this woman’s suggestion that I was being coddled was something like damn right, I should have called her out on the first chance I got.

Maybe we ALL need to be a bit more coddled because the world of social justice seems to be is full of “experts” who demand perfect allegiance to every single cause on the docket. I’m passionate about a lot of things and try to contribute where I can but this standard of all/nothing compliance is impossible to adhere to and I believe that it is also damaging our country’s ability to have civil conversations.  It is literally creating a world where people are afraid to even try to participate.

I am totally guilty of demanding this kind of compliance from others with my posts and too often shaming those who do not respond according to my standard of perfection against something. Right now, when it comes to anything close to supporting Donald Trump I am immoveable. I want him out of there. I don’t believe for one second he is a Christian at a heart level and I pretty much hate everything about the way he was elected and how he is running his administration.  I want the entire swamp to be drained  of traditional white male Republicans.  I’ve been hyper-focused on trying to get my people to see what a total jerk the man is. Have I succeeded? Not even a tiny bit. I am simply the fruit and nuts liberal black sheep. The tragedy is that I know we share many of the same values and want many of the same things.

My family grew up visiting National Parks. Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain National Parks were our favorites. We were not a wealthy bunch and yet we could enjoy these treasures together almost for free. The Black Hills and the Badlands are etched in my soul from childhood vacations. My strongly conservative parents LOVE these parks. When they were here a few weeks ago, in a calm voice and looking them in the eyes I was able to share what their party wants to do on these sacred lands. Drilling for gas and oil will change those places forever. I reminded them of our wonderful experiences in these places and how much they are in my heart as a result. It got quiet and they listened with heart and ears wide open. In one 20 minute civil, non-shaming, not personally condemning conversation, the world changed a little bit between us.

Of course I want to think of myself as a version of authors Brooke and Terry Tempest Williams when I’m ranting on Facebook about these parks but I will never be the experts that they are. I will likely never know the wild to the degree that they do but reading what they have written, empowers me to fight alongside them. What must change for me is to figure out how bring their messages to the people in my circle without condescension.  Trying to hold people accountable for what they do not know or understand isn’t working for America. Pretending to be experts and self-righteously declaring how stupid others are in their ignorance is only making all of us less aware and open to understanding.

I have a new Facebook page and I’m cautiously attempting to continue to be engaged but I am now committed to figuring out a new way to be the change I still very much want to be in this world.

I am imperfect but I am worthy of love and belonging – and patience as I struggle through toward deeper awareness and understanding.

Namaste

It takes no time at all to do a Google search and discover an incredible number of Christian leaders who are saying things like Rick Joyner just said, “God seems to be protecting Donald Trump. You smack him and God smacks you back.” In addition, Joyner quotes another “prophet” who received a word that 45 would be a modern day Cyrus the Great of Persia.  So spread throughout the Charismatic believers across this country there is this belief that God chose Donald Trump, God has anointed him and he cannot fail. As if that wasn’t enough, Mr. Joyner says that the Trump resistance is powered by the Spirit of Jezebel…of course it is…women with a strong voice are most always considered Jezebel’s in this world. Exhausting.

As one of these nasty Jezebelian women, I’m going to address this stuff tonight just to get it out of me and somewhere else. I’m going to address this with a bit of friendly fire,  a passage from the Old Testament in the Bible because I think it speaks very clearly to the reality of where Evangelical Christianity has veered way off course by becoming so utterly interwoven with the Republican/Tea Party/Alt Right politics.

One of Jesus’s disciples was named Peter and he is reported to have written these words,

1 Peter 5:2-3The Message (MSG)

He’ll Promote You at the Right Time

5 ^1-3 I have a special concern for you church leaders. I know what it’s like to be a leader, in on Christ’s sufferings as well as the coming glory. Here’s my concern: that you care for God’s flock with all the diligence of a shepherd. Not because you have to, but because you want to please God. Not calculating what you can get out of it, but acting spontaneously. Not bossily telling others what to do, but tenderly showing them the way.

The hard cold truth that seems completely absent from the public discourse anymore is that Christian leaders are first and foremost called to be shepherds of those believers under their care. It is what clergy are supposed to do. It is what mature lay people are supposed to grow into. The leaders we see now saying things like this, have forgotten their first love of Jesus and I see little evidence that they are acting as The Bible describes Shepherds of the Christian faith should be acting. Too many are instead usurping the faith’s authority for their own self righteous agenda masked as a prophetic voice.  They honestly seem to have replaced faith in God, fellowship in a community of believers and sacrificial lives of service to others for dictating to others how to think and what to believe about a political movement instead.  This is not what they are called to do or be as Christians. I am not a biblical scholar. In fact I have more doubt about the whole thing than I do certainty but one thing I do know for sure is that what I’m seeing in these “shepherds” is not what I’ve read in the same Bible they use to assert their authority.I guess in a nutshell, I am simply saying that if you are a Christian leader, this is what it seems should be your focus, NOT trying to convince us that Donald Trump is beyond reproach because you think he is chosen by God.

Ezekiel 34The Message (MSG) When the Sheep Get Scattered 34 1-6 God’s Message came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherd-leaders of Israel. Yes, prophesy! Tell those shepherds, ‘God, the Master, says: Doom to you shepherds of Israel, feeding your own mouths! Aren’t shepherds supposed to feed sheep? You drink the milk, you make clothes from the wool, you roast the lambs, but you don’t feed the sheep. You don’t build up the weak ones, don’t heal the sick, don’t doctor the injured, don’t go after the strays, don’t look for the lost. You bully and badger them. And now they’re scattered every which way because there was no shepherd—scattered and easy pickings for wolves and coyotes. Scattered—my sheep!—exposed and vulnerable across mountains and hills. My sheep scattered all over the world, and no one out looking for them! 7-9 “‘Therefore, shepherds, listen to the Message of God: As sure as I am the living God—Decree of God, the Master—because my sheep have been turned into mere prey, into easy meals for wolves because you shepherds ignored them and only fed yourselves, listen to what God has to say: 10 “‘Watch out! I’m coming down on the shepherds and taking my sheep back. They’re fired as shepherds of my sheep. No more shepherds who just feed themselves! I’ll rescue my sheep from their greed. They’re not going to feed off my sheep any longer! 11-16 “‘God, the Master, says: From now on, I myself am the shepherd. I’m going looking for them. As shepherds go after their flocks when they get scattered, I’m going after my sheep. I’ll rescue them from all the places they’ve been scattered to in the storms. I’ll bring them back from foreign peoples, gather them from foreign countries, and bring them back to their home country. I’ll feed them on the mountains of Israel, along the streams, among their own people. I’ll lead them into lush pasture so they can roam the mountain pastures of Israel, graze at leisure, feed in the rich pastures on the mountains of Israel. And I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep. I myself will make sure they get plenty of rest. I’ll go after the lost, I’ll collect the strays, I’ll doctor the injured, I’ll build up the weak ones and oversee the strong ones so they’re not exploited. 17-19 “‘And as for you, my dear flock, I’m stepping in and judging between one sheep and another, between rams and goats. Aren’t you satisfied to feed in good pasture without taking over the whole place? Can’t you be satisfied to drink from the clear stream without muddying the water with your feet? Why do the rest of my sheep have to make do with grass that’s trampled down and water that’s been muddied? 20-22 “‘Therefore, God, the Master, says: I myself am stepping in and making things right between the plump sheep and the skinny sheep. Because you forced your way with shoulder and rump and butted at all the weaker animals with your horns till you scattered them all over the hills, I’ll come in and save my dear flock, no longer let them be pushed around. I’ll step in and set things right between one sheep and another. 23-24 “‘I’ll appoint one shepherd over them all: my servant David. He’ll feed them. He’ll be their shepherd. And I, God, will be their God. My servant David will be their prince. I, God, have spoken. 25-27 “‘I’ll make a covenant of peace with them. I’ll banish fierce animals from the country so the sheep can live safely in the wilderness and sleep in the forest. I’ll make them and everything around my hill a blessing. I’ll send down plenty of rain in season—showers of blessing! The trees in the orchards will bear fruit, the ground will produce, they’ll feel content and safe on their land, and they’ll realize that I am God when I break them out of their slavery and rescue them from their slave masters. 28-29 “‘No longer will they be exploited by outsiders and ravaged by fierce beasts. They’ll live safe and sound, fearless and free. I’ll give them rich gardens, lavish in vegetables—no more living half-starved, no longer taunted by outsiders. 30-31 “‘They’ll know, beyond doubting, that I, God, am their God, that I’m with them and that they, the people Israel, are my people. Decree of God, the Master: You are my dear flock,     the flock of my pasture, my human flock, And I am your God.     Decree of God, the Master.’” The Message (MSG)Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson

The other day in a moment of incredible frustration I posted this on my Facebook page.

I’m just getting really, really sick of old white men calling all of the shots in DC! I love the old white guys in my life and respect their opinions but these guys in DC seem like monsters coming from the black lagoon!! Or a very icky swamp that was supposed to have been drained! Maybe they are the sludge at the bottom that needs cleaned out! What really pisses me off is how many women voted for them!! They can just keep sowing their patriarchy and over reaching authority because with every single thing they do they put another burr under the feminist saddle, the minority saddle, the environmentalist saddle, the Muslim saddle, the immigrant saddle and well…this angry actually LIVID horse is going to run their asses out of town at the very first chance it gets. In the mean time we are going to make this ride miserable for each and every one

Sometimes when posting it is easy forget that anyone else will read what you say because in the moment it’s simply just this great platform to express yourself…and ready for it or not…the pushback comes and  hits you square in the face. So was my experience with this post last week. I was completely surprised when a usually like-minded friend took great offense at my post. Because I singled out the whiteness of the current administration and number of elected officials as well as their age and gender, he determined that my comments were racist. I did my best to explain to him why I was not racist even so far as looking up the definition of the word and sharing that with him. I tried angle after angle to elaborate on why a concentration of old, white males in DC is bothersome to me and that saying so does not indicate that I am racist. He would have none of it. He even went so far to say this…

Thursday morning (2/2/17) on CBS News this morning, Frank Luntz said that he thinks that our country is unraveling, that it’s 1968 all over again.

“Nobody’s listening right now and if you can’t listen, you can’t learn and you can’t lead”  Frank Luntz

The words above spoken in conclusion of Mr. Luntz’s interview, were much more important to me than his assessment that the country is unraveling. Listening…learning and leadership should go hand in hand with each other but the choice to follow also comes as a result of listening. As a teacher I knew that if my students weren’t listening, nothing constructive was going to take place.  In the early days when I was student teaching I remember being so intimidated by a group of 25 fifth graders that I didn’t really connect with them and as a result, they had a hard time listening to me and I had a horrible time getting them to follow my lead. The consequences were embarrassing because my class truly did unravel and no one learned a thing that day. Eventually, I learned the skill of fully engaging with my students and became a more effective teacher.

One of the important skills I learned early in my career and one that continues to guide me in relationships comes from the author Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.   The Fifth Habit, quoted below, is especially meaningful to me right now in the midst of this crazy political climate we find ourselves in.

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”  Habit 5

This habit has served me very well for about 30 years but in all of that time it has never been as difficult for me to put it into practice as it was during this last election cycle and continues to be now that Donald Trump has been elected president .

As an advocate for multiple causes, what I want more than anything else is to help people understand whatever it is I’m advocating for. I want to create space for a need to be recognized to the point that others are  motivated to  change things.  In other words I want to be understood in order to make the world a better place. Close to home, I genuinely want my very conservative family members on both sides of our family to understand the journey Dean and I have been on and why it took away from the political paradigms we grew up with. I want them to understand that our life isn’t meant to be a criticism of them personally or of the way we were raised. We naively thought our lessons learned would be an opportunity for growth for them like it was for us. Issues concerning mental illness, eating disorders, the battle with insurance companies, our frustrations with doctors and hospitals and all of the friendly fire from church leaders and family when we sought to get our daughter the help she desperately needed.

I also want our families to understand my passion for youth and especially to understand the realities of kids with emotional and behavior disorders. I want them to understand that at the heart of me I am always going to want to make others happy, help to make their loads lighter etc. all with the hope that doing so will empower them to live a better life.  I want our friends and families to understand and believe that our work over the years, though it was not always as lucrative as theirs, was beautiful work and something we both gave our all to do. AND yet…after years of seeking to be understood, I have yet to discover how to communicate in any way that will allow me to know that we are in fact understood. It’s been so frustrating that I’ve just quit trying. In fact it’s had a devastating toll on multiple relationships because the quest to be understood and my inability to communicate effectively at a subsurface level hasn’t materialized yet.

And yet, when I look up I see out on the horizon a reminder of a time in the middle of the storm when words came to me that helped ME understand why this may be so. I wrote about it here. The gist of the experience is that you can have all the insight in the world or the very thing that someone needs to be healed BUT unless they are open to receiving it, it’s better not to waste your breath. At the time I was a very committed Evangelical wrestling with how to accept the healing advice being given to us from the treatment centers because some of it didn’t jive with my worldview. Trust me when I say that nothing tests one’s preconceived ideas about life and how to live it like being on the edge of death and we pretty much lived there for a number of years. As decision after decision is questioned, you find yourself struggling to justify your choice to who genuinely care for you and who you also care most about. In our situation it was as if my entire world was suddenly thrown into a seeking to be understood mode because the pressure was so great.

The problem is…this burrowing into my own understood world and caring primarily about seeking to be understood constantly backfires. I thought it was the compassionate and honorable thing to communicate our experiences through letters, phone calls and in person. In the midst of it I also discovered that when multiple traumas hit you, everything in your life is processed at a very intense level and  your felt need to be understood becomes even greater.  The pill in the ointment is that because these are the ones in your primary support system, those with whom you enjoy mutual trust, you expect that they will gain insight WITH you and that may or may not occur.

In 2003 our daughter’s doctors were telling us we had to get her into treatment or she would die but because it was an eating disorder our health insurance wouldn’t pay for it. Add to that and we were told that mental illnesses are generally not covered by insurance. She was also diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder/Severe in addition to the eating disorder.  Her physical health was severely compromised but the goal of the insurers was to rehydrate her and send her home. We love our daughter to the moon and back so we begged, borrowed and cashed in retirement accounts to get her where she needed to go.

An example of just how hard it is to be understood in the midst of this experience while Dean and I were working full-time,  some thoughtful conservative relatives knowing of our financial situation offered to help me by offering me a job.  They were dismayed that I didn’t take them up on the offer. I sought to be understood by sharing with them why I couldn’t consider it. Our  family was in crisis, our daughter was 2.5 hours away during her inpatient hospital stay and then 16 hours away in residential treatment, we had appointments to keep for family therapy and all the while were trying to hold down full time jobs and continue to live our lives. The $500 a month extra income was a drop in the bucket in light of the surreal nature of our situation. I thanked them and thought that would be it.

Unfortunately, with this person’s ultra conservative capitalist worldview in play, the free gifts that others graciously gave us to help with the very expensive life-saving treatment, were seen as inappropriate. Though never spoken, in multiple ways we got the message that we weren’t living the right way. In order to understand why this was we both reminded ourselves that this relative sincerely believes that NOTHING should EVER be a free gift unless it’s at an appropriate time like Christmas or a birthday.  We’ve let them be content with their world view and done our best to accept THEM in the midst of it. Though never directly spoken to us personally,  we clearly got the message that we were wrong in our understanding. The pushback was constant and increased until it was impossible to even continue in relationship with this family.  It has been a brutal pill to swallow.

In this hard right culture, when you can’t pull off the extra work offered so as to make your own way in the world, it is expected that you will simply suffer the consequences. Everything changes when death is on the line and if it doesn’t the loved one simply dies. That wasn’t going to happen on our watch if we could help it and unfortunately this is what it took for us to open ourselves up to others and seek to understand what they were trying to say to us. We’ve been through so many forms of reproof from those we love that I personally find it absolutely unbelievable. Real honestly, I have reached a point where I don’t even want to listen to understand anyone with such certainty about what is right or wrong. In such a black/white, all/nothing world view it is utterly useless and because it was once my own worldview, it’s not an easy task to continually deal with something you want to be rid of day in and day out.

I’ve written before about our journey away from our faith and our political party so if that interests you, please look through my other posts for that. Right now my resistance to the conservatives in my life isn’t there simply to resist though that is a very real issue for me with this president, is it also not my intent to disrespect anyone else’s view of the world.  I know that I am where I am as the result of listening to the reality of my life!

Maybe, the place where a revival of listening needs to talk place is first and foremost in our own lives. Maybe we each need to take more time to get quiet, to self-reflect on our own rigid thinking, our own judgment and our strong egocentric way of living our lives. The right and the left each could learn a lot from each other if we could discharge our insistence upon absolutes and certainty. I really think that only then will we stop being so polarized and find some common human ground to walk on together.

I know it’s really hard right now with the level of intensity created by Donald Trump’s impulsive, reactive temperament to not want to stay on Facebook, Twitter etc. and I’ve deactivated and reactivated my account multiple times as a result. I think I’ve realized that it simply isn’t the place where we are going to learn to listen to our own selves enough to challenge our own worldview and we certainly aren’t interested in understanding someone else’s very much there either.

I feel like I’m rambling in this post and I’m not sure if it’s making any sense to anyone but me. I know that Frank Luntz’s observation is correct in that we don’t listen, really listen to each other anymore and this is just my account of why that is so very hard to do.

Good night and good luck!

Evil, real evil, isn’t easy to understand especially in a day and age where moral lines are continually being redrawn. I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on the subject but there are a couple of authors who do and I think what they have to say could prove helpful to some of us trying to wrap our heads around some things that are taking place in our country at the beginning of 2017.

Many people, astonishingly, Christian people, do not seem to understand that when someone is mocked it means that the person has been treated with ridicule or contempt by another person who is out to hurt them. To this very day, Donald Trump claims that he did not mock the disabled reporter even though his actions recorded for all to see prove that he did. What many of us are struggling to comprehend is the silence from his own supporters in holding him accountable for his behavior. These very same supporters who are the same ones up in arms about Meryl Streep’s comments at the Golden Globes. She’s accused of “attacking Donald Trump” during her speech but the word attack by definition doesn’t even remotely describe what she said.

There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.

And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.

I seen no intent to harm Donald Trump’s person or even his presidency. What I see is a woman sharing her own emotional response, similar to what many of us had, with her audience. She also spoke out as an advocate for the disabled man. I honestly would have expected the outcry about Trump’s behavior toward this man to have come from pulpits around the country ahead of any actors in Hollywood because in Matthew 25:-39-40 we read:

“When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”

 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

It’s not rocket science to think that a disabled person would be among “the least of these” in this modern day.

But there was no outcry from Conservative Republican Christian pastors or their followers on my Facebook page. In fact there was quite the opposite. I continue to respond with dismay at the Tweet storm that this man engages in and how much mockery continues to be a part of his modus operandi. It seems that he lives and breathes to mock others and shame them into oblivion all in the context of, “Making America Great Again”. And day after day after day, Christians are rising up in his defense.  The problem with being a Christ follower in 2017 is that we have forgotten what real evil actually is.

According to Drs. Allender and Longman evil is particularly found in the behavior of a mocker.

THE MOCKER: DEALING WITH EVIL There are people in this world who seem to live and breathe evil. In every generation, masters of evil (Hitler, Stalin, Amin, Pol Pot) seem to serve as caricatures of the demonic. There are others, less known, who are involved in ritualistic abuse-the sadistic physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children. Few would dispute, even without definition, the accuracy of calling ing these people evil. Indeed, they are evil. There are many people, however, who do not perpetrate societal or individual barbarity to this demonic extent but who are more than simply arrogant, hard, and hurtful. All of us are capable of doing evil things, but evil people are driven by a self-interest that is so heartless, conscious, and cruel that it delights in stealing from others the lifeblood of their soul.

Dan B. Allender;Tremper Longman III. Bold Love (Spiritual Formation Study Guides) (Kindle Locations 2671-2676). Kindle Edition.

Evil Is Cold – Evil is (for the most part) unfeeling. It lacks sorrow when someone one suffers and joy when there is happiness. But an evil person is more than emotionally detached; he simply will not allow himself to enter the heart of his victim as a person. The victim is an object – an entity to be controlled or destroyed – and not a living, breathing being who feels hurt, fear, sorrow, and shame. In that regard, evil sees the other as nothing more than a service to itself. Most of us will use a paper cup and, when finished, discard it without feeling or concern. As long as the cup is useful, it is used, but when its use is finished, there is no reason to keep it or honor it as valuable. Similarly, an evil person feels nothing toward those who are used to satisfy his craving for unlimited power and control.

Dan B. Allender;Tremper Longman III. Bold Love (Spiritual Formation Study Guides) (Kindle Locations 2695-2696). Kindle Edition.

Though this is just one aspect of the evil I sense being unleashed in our country, it is extremely dangerous when perpetrated by anyone with this much power. I don’t think his Evangelical Christian Vice President has a clue as to the assault he is in for this next four years. Interestingly Paul Ryan knew this aspect of Trump almost at “hello” but now that he too has been given great power as a result of the Trump victory, he rarely, if ever calls the man out on this or other aspects of his bizarre behavior. It seems that now that he won, the whole of the GOP is intoxicated with absolute power and doesn’t really care anymore how they got there.

As we prepare to head out today and return to Logan, Utah, where we feel most at home in the world, many things have come to mind that have greatly enriched our lives. Thought I’d just bullet some of them as I depart.

• Great neighbors – this would take an entire blog to adequately do justice to. You all know who you are and you will be missed! A special shout out to the beautiful kids and young adults who wormed their way into our hearts at “hello”.  The future is bright with you in the world.
• Scout and Morgan Bookstore!! – Judith Kissner, your store was a refuge on those LONG days each winter.  I loved every visit – Kirby, Elsa and Baxter loved your welcomes too! Amazing author events and very special Christmas Eve treats!
• City Center Market – This is a whole foods coop that is a grocery store, deli and coffee shop next to the bookstore. I will really miss this place.
• Common Ground United Methodist Church – A place of progressive Christians committed to social justice where everyone counts and is welcome…and they really mean EVERYONE. Beautiful people and we’re very thankful for what we’ve learned with them.
• The Andover YMCA – this is a great facility connected to the Andover Community Center. Swimming in the pool regularly has allowed me to get stronger and enjoy my life again.
• The Twin Cities… the hometown of…OnBeing studios, Garrison Keilor, The Links, The Vikings, The Twins, The Wild and The Timberwolves…author events where I was privileged to experience Terry Tempest and Brooke Williams, the poet Paul Muldoon, Courtney Martin and Cheryl Strayed…the Mall of America, a great place to walk around in the winter and to eat at Bubba Gump Shrimp…The Swedish Institute…The Walker Art Museum…Brits Pub…Keys Cafes…Minneapolis Institute of Art…The Science Museum and the Fitzgerald Theater…Minnehaha Falls…Stillwater…Nicolette Island…sure I missed something. Suffice it to say, this place is amazing!
• Duluth…we LOVE Duluth. Canal Park and its multiple ships coming into the harbor. The magical night we spent at the Bentleyville Christmas display and watched a ship come with almost no one around (a very rare thing at Canal Park) with fresh fallen snow and it being so quiet we could hear the ship cut through the water. The huge rocks, the big waves and The Scenic Cafe on the North Shore where we enjoyed lots of the most yummy chef prepared food we’ve ever eaten! We do love Duluth.
• Leech Lake – our off season trip where the staff gave us a suite that faced the water for the price of our individual room reservation. We woke up to the sun coming up over the water and walked the beach alone for a long time. We finally GET going Up Nort!! Those lakes are intoxicating!
• The Woods…though I can’t handle the dark of the woods 24/7, they were often the most amazing places to be. Black-capped chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, orioles, pileated woodpeckers, finches, bluebirds and the list of birds goes on! White birch trees – year around solace for any nature lover!

So, you can see we have loved life in Minnesota. So why move, Seasonal Affective Disorder. I cannot believe the impact of life on the 45th parallel and the cumulative affect the seasonal depression has had on my overall health and wellbeing. This fall when it hit with hard again, I knew that if I was going to live much longer, I would need to get to a place with a lot more sunshine on a daily basis – or where I can go up to a mountain and soak some up if I need to.

Thank you, Minnesota, even thought I need to go, it’s been brutiful living here among you…beautiful and brutal (Glennon Doyle Melton)

In 2008 when Barak Obama was elected president, I was so frustrated. Not because he was a black, Democrat at all, but by the dialog I had witnessed throughout the election cycle from my own Republican party. Having dealt spent years dealing with a very unethical insurance company, healthcare reform was HUGE for me. I really wanted the Republicans to take up the fight because I wanted that perspective deeply in the mix when anything was to be done about it. I’d written to multiple Republicans with zero movement or even a decent response in return. The Nebraska senator I wrote to was much more concerned about overturning Nebraska’s helmet law that year than anything else. The ONLY ones validating my story and the need for reform were the liberal (demon) Democrats so I began to go where I could be heard.

I met very interesting and amazing people who were not at all the abortion on demand like a fast food restaurant kind of people, or eager to turn all of our children gay kind of people. For the most part they were just like me. They leaned left because their natural tendencies leaned left. Many of these new friends were as servant oriented and culture sensitive as anyone in my church. I learned so much from them while thinking I was maintaining my Conservative Republican status. The 2008 election changed it all for me.

What I realized that election cycle was that a very important piece of our democracy had been lost to all of us. As a Republican, with issues other than those in the party platform, I was given no voice.  My real life experiences meant absolutely nothing to those I’d elected to represent me in government.That realization led to an even more astonishing one and that was that the Republican Party had been so strongly influenced by the Evangelical Christian worldview that many of its members believed God was white, American and Evangelical and that this was the one and only worldview that would be acceptable in our country. These sincere people simply don’t realize that they have made God into THEIR OWN IMAGE and it reflects something very different from the image of the God one finds in the Old or New Testaments of the Bible.

Check out this list of the names of God found in the Bible. 

God is these things if you believe in a Christian God. God is not a Republican

The beauty of America is that here we are free to be whatever political persuasion we want to be. We are free to be whatever religion we want to be. I am free to be a Christian and a Liberal or a Conservative and  remain in complete connection with God Almighty. And though I do believe there is an all knowing God at the end of the day, it may all be nothing but my imagination. Belief is at its core faith in the unseen and we cannot make anyone have it let alone require it of government officials. When we do that, we get what has happened in this current situation. I say that because…God and Jesus aren’t running for President, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are. They are Americans. We as a nation chose them to run against each other. Consider this.

Jesus wasn’t an American winner.

Jesus wasn’t a capitalist.

Jesus wasn’t a communist.

Jesus wasn’t a socialist.

Jesus certain was NOT a dictator.

Jesus was a servant. He wasn’t head of a government. If the governments rest on his shoulders as the Bible says they do, then he gets to bear the burden of them all the world over. As well as the humans carrying them out and I wouldn’t want to be him for anything.

I think that the only way politics and faith can work together is if we take our faith seriously and allow that faith to lead us in voting for the best person to run the government…not our faith. Anyone who is elected needs to be able to support ALL Americans and allow them the freedom to believe. We are not America if we are only Christian.

As a teacher in an Evangelical Christian school, one of the beautiful things I got to teach my students was American History. The text I used was organized in chapters focused on early American heroes. There were few women in the mix but one of them stood out to me in a way I had never really appreciated before, Clara Barton. Clara was a nurse during the civil war who challenged male authority by going out into the battlefield to take care of soldiers rather than wait for them in the hospital as she had been instructed to do. For Clara the restriction of staying behind when her immediate interventions could save lives out in the middle of it all was ludicrous.  However, the only way she could be free to go was if a man gave her his permission.   Lives were literally lost because she wasn’t free to lead in the way her intellect, heart and profession demanded that she do so.

I’ve never forgotten that experience because from then on I have been a student of women’s rights, something one cannot study without discovering patterns of abuse, neglect, assault and domination at the hands of men. There are many, many Christian men who do not control their wives or do any of these things, and thankfully, I’m married to one. Our idea of a Christian marriage is one where both of us respect each other, both of us love each other and most of all both of us submit to one another as we go through our lives. Dean has never ever pulled rank in our relationship. Thirty three years and counting and though we’ve had lots of battles between us, I simply do not have one memory of such an event.

While keeping my observational mind engaged, I began to observe a interesting dynamic among many Christian women who claimed to believe in the literal mandate to submit to their husbands and male authority in the church. Sincere, devout women with leadership skills, creative minds, and incredible intelligence had developed cunning powers of manipulation and control behind the scenes. One primary way to win over a husbands gift of permission was to offer him the most highly sensual experiences one could muster in the privacy of the bedroom. As women, we all knew that our power rested in pleasing a man’s sexual appetite. We all knew that if we were good enough in the sack, exclusive enough in our looks so as to  please him, he would be willing to do whatever it was that we wanted. We just never said that out loud.

Much of the talk validating this reality took place between women over a cup of coffee or in a Christian counseling session. During one such session where Dean and I were seeking to better our marriage, the (male Christian elder) counselor from our church quoted a scripture telling me that my body actually belonged to Dean and if I could recognize that our marriage issues would be resolved. What this man didn’t know about me was that at 5 I was forced into a shed and molested by a 14 year old male in my “safe” neighborhood. He also didn’t know that an uncle had repeatedly sexually abused me.  I can tell you that it was incredibly devastating to hear the words that my body didn’t belong to me simply because I was married. It was even more disgusting to me that sex was brought up at all because our marriage had multiple facets to its beauty that needed to be addressed. Communication and values for one. Thankfully, both Dean and I were disgusted with that counsel and never went back. He has no desire to own my body.

In 2004 my daughter entered residential treatment for a life-threatening eating disorder. As our family entered counseling we discovered some very painful truth about our daughter’s reality. She was dealing with a very altered brain from a very traumatic birth and medical trauma. That in itself would be enough to devastate us but beyond that we learned that having taught her to obey authority without question, she had no way of communicating her pain to us. No way of communicating her confusion, her intense depression and anxiety over simple daily life experiences. The only way she found relief from the intense emotion was to binge and purge. When one binges chemicals are released in the brain that soothe us. When we throw up the very same chemicals are released. It is in this way that the eating disorder begins to take hold and control ones life. It is as  powerful as drug addiction.

As time went on I began to see learn about countless women dealing with bulimia. In numbers that would astonish anyone, I heard story after story after story of women who  had their bodies stolen from them as a child by an older, stronger male. Women who were bright, intelligent and strong, who were completely afraid of their own selves or unaware of their own selves apart from the thoughts and opinions of others. Not every person with an eating disorder has this as part of their story, but there are WAY too many who do.

Our experiences with H’s recovery brought us to a time when we found ourselves in Washington, D.C. in a room with a very conscientious senator who had altered her schedule to attend a briefing on eating disorders and their impact on our society. That senator was Hillary Rodham Clinton. Dean and I were still devout Republicans at the time and just the mention of her name made us shudder. We felt free to actually give her a hearing because none of our family members or friends from home were anywhere near us and this issue consumed us. Trust me, when someone you love has an eating disorder as severe as our daughter did, you have to rethink everything so for us being in the same room with Hillary made her just one more thing to reconsider.

Over the last decade I have become a student of this woman. Of course she is a politician and yet she is a woman in a world dominated by men. She’s been called everything imaginable by men – Dr. Dobson the founder of Focus on the Family made a statement recently saying that American has become too feminized and as a result she has to be stopped. What on earth could be so wrong with a country becoming more “feminized” unless one believes that the feminine is less than, evil etc.? So as a result of this, he has even endorsed Donald Trump who represents nothing good about morals or integrity but who has done what they wanted and “accepted Jesus” something that was of course seen as sincere regardless of his own quest for power and for the Evangelical vote.

Hillary is seen as a baby-killer without a heart because that is what Evangelical’s want her to be seen as. In reality she would like to make abortions rare but as women choose to end an unwanted pregnancy – say after a man like Donald Trump as raped them, she also wants them to have a safe procedure. I would never want to abort a baby for any reason but having never been raped and become pregnant, I have to understand that the choice is much more complicated than I would like to admit it to be for lots of women.  The real craziness is that Trump IS a pro-choice Republican! He has said that the abortion laws should remain the same! When it comes to the whole of life, Hillary is much more interested in it that he is by a long shot!

I am voting for Hillary because it’s time that patriarchy in American politics topples. I’m sick and tired of men armed with biblical passages determining the fate of women’s lives. I’m sick and tired of being treated differently because I have female anatomy. I respect the Bible as literature and the testimony of the authors encounters with God and how they chose to lead the church in ancient times. I don’t think God is male or female and I certainly don’t think he is anything like Donald Trump or the Evangelical leaders who have twisted their scriptures to validate their own ends.

I’m with her because she is one amazing woman in a man’s world who is standing tall after all of these years.

I’m with her because the lynch mobs in the House and Senate haven’t found a legal way to hang her.

I’m with her because there is zero hope for our country to be anything but a pawn in Trump’s hands for his own benefit. He doesn’t care about America. He cares about himself, his power, his control and that is really all. He makes it clear every time he opens his mouth.

I am with her.

I am so blown away how God blessed my lunch in the park today. Every Monday I have this ritual of eating a Chick-fa-la grilled chicken sandwich meal. It’s a beautiful fall day here in Minnesota and I thought it would be a good idea to grab my lunch and find a park to eat it in. I ended up at Coon Creek Park in Coon Rapids. I walked on the bridge over the creek and to the picnic tables. As I rounded the corner, I saw three Muslim women  sitting at tables under a canopy while a man cooked carp over the grill.  In what seemed automatic, I approached them and as I did, one of women said, “Do you want to sit?” Yes.I.did.

I sat down and they all smiled and said hello to me. Immediately the woman sitting across from me asked me if I would like to eat with them. Thankfully, for me, I was going to be well into my chicken sandwich long before the carp on the grill was finished cooking. With the exception of rainbow trout, I’m NOT a fish eater. Dean would certainly have taken her up on the offer. As we sat together I started asking questions and in her best broken English she tried to answer them.

Her name was Miriam, her sisters were Fatima and Zimzim. Her brother was Muhammed. They were refugees from Iraq who have been in Coon Rapids for about a year. Her heart is sad because her parents were sent to Turkey. The women do not work, I imagine that their faith doesn’t allow it but I’m not sure. Muhammed works at WalMart and another brother does as well. Somehow they manage to make life work here.

As one born with more empathy for others than is sometimes good for me, all I could think about was making sure that they knew that this American, this white 55 year old of German/English descent, valued their humanity. I wanted the forces of darkness in the world to know too. I wanted everyone who walked by to see us and recognize our shared humanness a bit more with me sitting at their table.

As I finished my lunch and got ready to go, Muhammed was eager to show me how he had cooked his fish and what parts of it they ate. He asked me what my husband did and where he worked and I tried to explain grain handling equipment to him.  He asked where I worked :).  He told me where I could go to buy fish like that if I wanted to and then he asked if I wanted to eat with them.

I started to leave  and say good bye but before I knew it, the three women were hugging me and telling me that they loved me. One even kissed my cheek as she hugged me. I know, lots of touchy feely emotion for us here in Minnesota!! I’m a hugger so it was just fine with me. As I left their presence and started to walk across the bridge and back to my car, I was in tears because I was so overwhelmed with gratitude for what had just happened.

On a Monday when the news is so awful coming from St. Cloud and around the country, I sincerely wanted to push back against the darkness in anyway I could. I had no idea that God would be so eager to honor that desire and make this meeting take place. I am a blessed woman.

Me…Zumzum, Miriam and Fatima – new friends from Iraq

Muhammed cooks carp over an open fire

Ah, the Mayo Clinic…this Tuesday I will return to Rochester for an evaluation. This time it will be of my left thoracic region…aka my left chest and shoulder. I have had multiple visits to the Er in the last year with symptoms no one has been able to attach to a diagnosis and after a difficult PT experience last week, I went on a mission to find someone somewhere who can accurately diagnose what’s going on.

Last August I had a day where I woke up in the morning and couldn’t stand up because I’d slept on my left side and along with my arm being numb, so was my head. As I woke up and tried to move around I began to experience chest pains. My left arm was throbbing and in pain so I got Dean to come home and take me to the ER. It was an uneventful visit and after they ruled out a heart attack, they sent me home. It was late afternoon before I felt somewhat normal but there was no diagnosis beyond, “this is probably related to your thoracotomy so continue with physical therapy and stretching”.

As the summer wore on I figured out how not to sleep on my arm, we bought a bed that elevates each side and I continued doing exercises. After several other weird episodes and visits to doctors, MRI’s and X-rays taken, there was still no resolution. Medicine is so specialized that when one discipline finishes up with you they often just let you go. I know from a lifetime of experience that we are each our own best advocate.  

After working with the GI specialist and rheumatologist at Mayo, some of my symptoms were thought to be coming from Sjogren’s Syndrome. I began to take high powered meds to suppress my immune system. If you’ll recall, taking the third of those meds put me in the hospital fighting for my life. I’ve recovered well from that nightmare and have simply continued to try to do the exercises and work I can to make things better.

Last spring I began to have a sore throat that would not go away. I was tested for strep etc. but nothing showed up  but nothing showed up. Eventually I was sent to a ear, nose and throat doctor. After looking into my throat he discovered that my left vocal chords are paralyzed. No idea if that’s where my pain is coming from but it is likely.

Simultaneously I was seeing an orthopedic doctor to rule out a rotator cuff injury as cause for the pain in my shoulder. He said my shoulder blade was in the wrong place and ordered  yet more PT. I did really well with it and found a lot of relief. I was very optimistic. On the follow up visit, the doctor said my shoulder was in much better shape but the issues of numbness in my arm, pain in my chest and changes in my heart rate have been attributed to Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. He ordered more PT and last week during a PT appointment, the therapist began the process of lowering my left rib cage through intense and deep massage. I have a lot of scaring on that side and apparently the left rib is causing a lot of issues.  

The next morning I woke up with excruciating pain in my shoulder, my chest and my neck. It lasted for 3 days.  I realized then that I needed to find someone who specializes in this syndrome so that I actually have a clear diagnosis and plan for treating it.  After doing multiple Google searches, I discovered that the Mayo Clinic assesses it with their team approach, which I’m very familiar with, so I made an appointment there to get an evaluation. When I was making the appointment, the scheduler asked me if I felt symptoms in my face  in order to determine whether I would begin with neurology or cardiology first. I have brought this face pain to the attention of other doctors and it was either minimized or was thought to be coming from a disk injury in my neck. Two MRI’s on my neck proved that it wasn’t coming from that. I found it reassuring to know that this is a symptom of TOS and does have to do with cardiac issues even if the heart itself is in good shape. After that question, I know I’m heading in the right direction. 

I’m scheduled to see the cardiac thoracic specialists on Tuesday and will be back and forth until they figure out what my next steps are.  I sincerely hope there is something that can be done  because the condition continues to greatly alter my life. 

Please send your prayers or positive vibes my way next week. I’d really appreciate it.

In college I met this farm boy named Dean Wedekind. Farmers were everywhere in Nebraska so the odds were pretty good I’d end up with one. This one had a spirit of adventure. We were eager to bring love and light to the darkest parts of the world through our Christian faith. We were young, idealists with big dreams.

We finished school the year after we were married and couldn’t wait to become parents. Stephen arrived in March of 85 and Hannah followed in December of 86 (3 months early). Plans to become career missionaries somewhere in the world turned into being responsible parents in our home town. Our lives were full, a bit too full with so much activity that we nearly drowned.

In 1992 my body broke down and I became seriously ill. I went on disability for two years. We leaned into our lives and sought ways to live with my fragility. I recovered. We learned to set boundaries and limits and most of all to create margins of space in our lives for what we valued most. We became more thoughtful in our decisions to put our oars in but when we put them in we continued to navigate the waters of American life to the best of our ability.

Our kids have been our greatest teachers. They have both found their way to adult life with our support in the background. They have flown into their own best lives and we are very grateful for their tenacity to continue, to thrive and most of all for their sensitivity to the world around them.

Moving to Minnesota from Utah in 2010 was an enormous upheaval in our relationship. Back and forth for the first year, an extreme adjustment to climate and culture as well as my minor surgery that turned into a major nightmare in 2011 has taken us through life lived too close to the edge between this world and the next.

We sometimes wonder why we are still together. Is it because we started out as Evangelical Christians and that ensured our longevity as a couple? No.

Is it because we’re Nebraskan’s and as Paul Harvey told us in the 70’s and 80’s, Nebraska marriages last the longest? No.

I think it is because we both came at our relationship from the very beginning with the deeper sense of what we personally wanted in our lives. We had both dated people before we met and each time we’d reach this place where  we knew that if we married that person, our lives would go in a direction that we didn’t really want.

I personally loved Dean because he had a heart for mankind that was rare among the others I’d spent time with. Our first greatest moments come when we’re in the presence of someone not like us and we are seeking to get to know them. We’ve met amazing, amazing people along our marriage pathway and we’re incredibly better because of it. Our second greatest moments come from being out in the natural world together. We each experience it differently but the same.  We both feel the connection to the earth (and for Dean the cosmos 🙂 very strongly.

I am thankful today, 33 years later, that though our relationship doesn’t really look a lot like it did back then…we’ve grown into better individuals because we’re married to each other. We lean into our lives whatever they are at present and for that, I’m so grateful.

Happy 33rd Anniversary, Dean Wedekind. I like being your wife.

With all of the talk about racism at present, I have to ask, as should you, “Am I racist?” I don’t think it’s helpful to ask myself if I actually am I a racist because being a racist implies that it is what I am in an all encompassing way. I know for sure that I am not of the opinion that being a white caucasian of European dissent translates into my superiority as a human being. That said, being white from birth on I find that whether intended or not, I want to believe that my race is the superior race. It’s not a conscious desire, in fact I am very intentional in my actions and way of life to make sure that anyone different from myself knows that I accept that first and foremost they are human beings of value.

In the 60’s, I grew up as a white child in a low income and very diverse community in the Midwest. I have come to understand that the time I spent living there shaped my worldview in ways that many growing up in predominantly all white European communities honestly don’t understand. The interesting thing is that a large part of the minority group in my life at that time where the Sioux Native Americans – Native…meaning they were the first ones on the ground I walked on everyday. I didn’t know them as natives then, they were just Indians. Indians with lice and alcoholic parents at home where the floors were dirt (literally). And every Saturday morning Bugs Bunny and other cartoons reinforced the prevailing worldview that Indians were once the enemies of Americans (aka white people) and killing them was just part of our Nebraska history. It was what had to be done because they were dangerous with their bows, arrows and tomahawks.  It was an interesting childhood because at school and in my neighborhood Native American children were my peers but in the world at large they were  definitely in a different place though I didn’t really understand that place at all.

This summer several new homes went up in our development on the north edge of the Twin Cities. Three different black families purchased homes among them. Dean and I eagerly went over and met each one. Among them we met some who were born here and some who were not. One of the Cameroon who moved here as a child whose spouse is from Kenya. They met in college in Mankato. Intelligent professionals with a lovely son. Another family moved in from St. Paul. We were just so happy to find diversity moving into our neighborhood. At the same time, on one random day I was driving home and as I drove down our street, a thought came into my mind, saying, “I wonder if our home value will go down now that we have more black people in the neighborhood.” It stopped me cold. “Where the hell did THAT come from?” was my next thought! It really unsettled me for awhile. It’s even difficult now to actually see it on the screen in front of me.

If you know me well, you know that I have been always been a passionate advocate for racial justice. My book shelves in the family room are lined with books full of stories from around the globe of injustice implemented simply because someone’s skin was black. I’m a global citizen and have been since being exposed to foreign missions in college. Then the impetus was to reach the world for Jesus and as I sought to do that, met dozens of people from all over the place. I taught students, the children of visiting missionaries, from several other countries and I specifically taught that just as there is one God, even though expressed in the Trinity for us Christians, there is one thing that makes us God’s children, being human. So, again, in my mortified state, I continued to ask myself “Where the hell did I get the thought that these all black families who moved into my neighborhood could bring our property value down?” It wasn’t long before I had an answer.

I believe this thought came from a place in myself that I was completely unaware of. I now understand it to be a message recorded so firmly into my subconscious that when circumstances aligned the way they did, there it was. In every way I don’t feel that this is actually true, and if it were, then so be it! These dear people are equal to me and deserve to live wherever they want to. I truly believe that.

Today I am so grateful for the lesson that came to me in this weird experience. I always knew roots of white supremacy were imbedded in my genetic history. As a result, I have purposely challenged myself on multiple occasions to seek to understand what it is my darker-skinned fellow humans are saying. Clearly, it is going to be a lifetime pursuit but one that I plan to continue to embrace.

I read this amazing poem by David Whyte and felt as if God dropped it right out of heaven. I especially felt drawn to the line,

“Give up all the other worlds except to the one to which you belong.”

It’s no secret to anyone that in 2010 when we uprooted from Logan, Utah, and came to Minnesota for Dean’s new job, it was only a matter of time before I felt completely lost to myself. I didn’t understand how to adjust to the layers of culture here in a way that allowed me to feel as if I belonged anywhere. These layers include:

• Small town culture but a small town on the far edge of the Twin Cities with access to plays, music, sports, parks and all kinds of activity if you just hop in the car and drive an hour or so.
• Scandinavian culture where the concept of  “Minnesota Nice” comes from. The hardest part of this was the aversion to eye contact and not greeting people when you pass them in a hallway. Well, not really, the most difficult part was the passive aggression that is honestly just normal here and people don’t let it bother them too much. Everyone participates in passive aggression to some degree but Minnesota’s version is often very hard on outsiders unfamiliar to it.
• The Lake Culture: This means you live in a neighborhood that empties out most weekends throughout the summer. Few fireworks explode on your street over the 4th of July.
• The Commuting Culture: This means that people go to bed very early because they get up very early. I’m used to it now but at first I could hardly believe how many people drove anywhere from 20 minutes to almost 2 hours to work and back every day. Having only done that once and when we lived in Utah, my commute was shear beauty for me. I drove straight toward the Wellsville Mountains and was always treated to whatever nature had to share with me. It was more spiritual than drudgery so the idea of driving through traffic like they do here almost made me feel sick. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about the fossil fuel consumption, the air pollution etc. No longer something I think too much about because it is just life here and I’d have gone completely crazy if I’d of not adjusted.

In addition to these adjustments I was also going through the acclimation process one’s body goes through moving 3 degrees north in latitude from where one has lived most of her life. The seasons are incredibly distinct here and almost totally follow the equinox for each one. Winter is utterly brutal and unrelenting. There are more cloudy days here than I ever imagined possible except for Seattle or Portland. And the trees…omg…the trees. We lived in a forest and even though we removed half the trees on our property, every summer when the trees would leaf out our entire house was as dark as if it were a winter day. This wide open spaces woman began to feel caved in. Moving into a newer development with small trees has made a big difference for me in that our house faces south which means that we get whatever sun is out there streaming in our windows all year. So, after 6.5 years I am finally feeling more acclimated but the winter remains a challenge for me.

Health problems and a forced retirement were pretty much the last straw for me where this move was concerned. I would say that in every way, I have struggled to belong here and I think that is the reason why David Whyte’s words stood out to me so much. It would be utterly impossible to completely “give up the worlds where I don’t belong” here in Minnesota because trust me when I say, Minnesota is a thick culture and the people here love being Minnesotan more than just about anything else. I have been here long enough to have seen below the surface and I do genuinely love many people and much about their lives here. Adjusting to so many changes at once though has made it very difficult for me to remain centered and able to participate in the worlds where I know I actually belong. After reading this line from David’s poem and not being able to stop thinking about it, I sat down and wrote the following gems that have come out of the last several years of refinement in my life from the many things I’ve been through. I’ve learned SO much that it was time to get the lessons out there for myself. The experience proved to be very clarifying and reorienting so I just wanted to share them in writing for those who’ve walked with me as I’ve gone through this season. I’m sure you know who you are.

The World Where I Belong

The world where I belong is any world where I’m communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.

The world where I belong processes past, present and future simultaneously and understands that really everything belongs.

The world where I belong is one that does not control the life on another, it allows the other to exist as they are while encouraging grace, growth and personal responsibility so the other can flourish as they choose to, with or without me.

The world where I belong creates beauty and prepares places for myself and others to enjoy.

The world where I belong values life from conception to the grave, the life under every color of skin, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity in every place, at all times.

The world where I belong enlarges the spaces for others to do what THEY are uniquely called and gifted to do.

The world where I belong loves others but does not succumb to their trauma manifested in abuse of any kind or in anyone’s attempt to control me in any way.

The world where I belong to is beautiful, full and meaningful. It sees hope in the future because youth are always able to change the world.

The world where I belong is an abundant and generous place where light overcomes darkness.

The world where I belong finds me at home with the poor, the middle and the wealthy because I accept capitalism’s strength and weaknesses while at the same time do my best to level the playing field where I can.

The world where I belong loves the earth, the sun, the galaxies and is committed to learning new ways to take care of it because I am in constant awe of it all.

The world where I belong is full of rich, heart connected friendships with people of all ages.

The world where I belong is with my husband and children as healthy adults doing their best in the world. It is with aging parents offering supportive care as I am able.

This is the world where I belong.

Wow, how things can change in an instant. Honestly, there we were just sitting on the patio shooting the breeze after Dean got home from work and I said, “I’m going in to lay down for awhile, I think this medicine is already making me sick.”

I made it to the bedroom and my body seemed to begin going into hysterics without me. Flu like symptoms, heart racing, dizzy and utterly wasted with no energy to hardly stand up. It hit so intensely that I told Dean he was going to need to take me to the hospital. We got out to the car and I said, “You need to call and ambulance. I can’t even get into the car.”

The rest is a bit of blur after that…I’m on the floor at the top of the stairs, he’s on the phone, I hear our address spoken, two guys in brown shirts sporting sheriff’s badges are coming up my stairs with an oxygen tank. One says my name and I respond. Before long there are more guys in the house and one wants me to sit up which I can’t even begin to do and before I know it, I’m being carried down my stairs on a sheet, placed on a cart and whisked away to the hospital.

The entire ride was hell. I’m losing my bodily fluids by a stranger, I can’t feel my hands or feet and am told I’m hyperventilating. “Count to five when you breathe in and exhale slowly” How is it that I remember that part? Because every freakin person I saw until they put me into lala land kept admonishing me to do just that. I could hardly think let alone count to five. I arrived at the hospital a total mess in every possible way.  I’m whisked into a room and they start asking question, after question, after question. This spunky little nurse says, “Jane, you are going to have to answer my questions”

“Oh, am I?” said I to myself. I didn’t.

It was just minutes and I was surrounded by strangers (who do this every day for a living, thank God!) and was told that I had lost too much fluid and was becoming hypovolemic which can apparently lead to organ failure because the electrolytes get all out of whack etc. Well, what does one need in such situations? IV’s lots of them and then out of the blue this man shows up and tells me he’s from respiratory therapy. I soon learned that it meant that he was going to be the one intubating me so they could get a central line IV in and put me in the ICU.

The next morning I woke up to Dean on one side of me, Hannah on the other and this ginormous thing in my mouth. As I slowly come back to the land of the living, they began to fill me in on just what happened to me. Dean told me the ICU doctor told him, “My job is to keep her alive tonight”.  OMG…I still can’t believe it.

I came home yesterday (Saturday 7/2) around 1. As we drove into the neighborhood I asked Dean if there had been anyone outside when they picked me up. He said, “Yes, everyone was outside – after work etc.”.  He went on to say that kids grow up and see things like this and it’s just part of real life. He’s right, but does it have to be MY real life?

It would appear that the medication I took to suppress my immune system in order to control the auto-immune flare up I’ve been dealing with was what my body reacted to according to one doctor, the other thinks I had an infection (he was a GI specialist rather miffed that I was seeing doctors at Mayo – seriously?!) Dean and I are attributing it to the medication because I took the drug for 3 months in the early 90’s and developed liver toxicity to it back then. Though I never became this sick from it, it seems too coincidental for us to think otherwise. My doctor’s rationale for using it, his preliminary tests and method of delivery were all  sound and based on good science but nonetheless, my body said, “No”.

I have so much to learn. My therapist and I have been talking about listening to my body for the past 5 years but in a world of rational western medicine that sounds almost crazy. That vein of thought says objective evidence rules the day. One GI doctor told me, stress doesn’t make us sick. It’s just what doctor’s say when they don’t know what’s really wrong. In the ER no one was asking my body any questions in the ethereal sense but instead they were looking at the evidence in front of them, making their best decisions for my welfare. Those decisions were based on years of scientific research and study that didn’t even originate with them but as discoveries were made, more questions were asked, new insights gained etc. Realizing that my muscles were cramping, my extremities turning color and my consciousness slipping away, they acted in seconds and saved my life as a result. I cannot discount any of it. But how do I process the reality that I took a medication that had already proven itself toxic to my body and that as a result I ended up in Intensive Care fighting for my life? How do I process that without feeling totally responsible? I can hear a family member who hates western medicine in all its forms almost gleefully saying, “I told you so.”

I often feel as if I’m a person caught in this swirling vortex with stuff from the western and eastern medicinal worlds whirling into my life at such breakneck speed that I cannot even begin to make the best decisions for myself. I do the best I can to be rational and sound-minded but it is less than easy most of the time. In our modern world once you get an illness of any kind, the information flood that comes your way can be as unhealthy for you as the illness itself and of course, it all comes at you when you already feel like crap.

Living in this vortex for so very long and navigating my way through so much information over the years makes me somewhat guarded when sharing about the details of my journey. I honestly used to just live my life as a wide open book, even for Nebraska standards, but the years have taught me that when you open your life up to people, you are instantly vulnerable.  And yet, it’s not the vulnerability to more pain and confusion that I fear, though that is there too, what I dreaded most when Dean told me he had let our friends know via Facebook was the exposure that I’d made a really stupid decision to try a medication that had been toxic to me before and ended up in the hospital fighting for my life as a result.  Seriously, each time I check FB I hope I don’t get some kind of message reminding me how terrible western medicine is with suggestions of the latest oil, herb or flower to try.

I’m sharing this because I do feel vulnerable. I feel vulnerable because I have a disease that has lurked in the shadows of my life since I saw my first rheumatologist at 16, woke up from its sleep after I had my first baby and very likely contributed to my second baby’s prematurity. This disease is emotional, spiritual, physical, mental and any other thing that we humans have going on in and about us. I need to say for my own well being that I am doing the very best that I know how, that I do not want to be sick and cause my family and friends to worry. Everyone I personally know who lives with a chronic illness is living life in this vortex and we give thanks for anyone who just lets us deal with it the best way we know how and loves us as we are.

I want to live and enjoy my healthy daughter and taste her joy as she cares for the elderly.

I want to hike up Logan Canyon, around Tony Grove Lake and sit on the shores of Bear Lake with my life partner …every day. one of these. for the rest of our life, would suit just fine 🙂

I want to go to a live show in Austin with Stephen and Theresa and eat at Torchie’s Tacos on a Sunday morning for breakfast.

I want to hold baby Ava Sue Dinkel and play with Stinky Jones and Stinky Pete then take big sis Lexie out for ice cream. I want to fly in my brother’s plane.

I want to live and

I will say when this journey is done…auto-immune disease or not…

“I lived”.

Thanks for being there for me, for us.

Today I went to the Mayo Clinic for some blood tests. The man who drew my blood is a stellar professional when it comes to getting blood from my tiny veins. Second time in a row he nailed it with the first poke. It’s rare that you ever get the same phlebotomist at The Mayo so it felt a bit serendipitous to meet up with this guy again. I don’t remember his name but both the first and last ones were clearly Muslim-like so, I just looked up at him and said, “With a name like yours are you Muslim?” He said he was and we had a fantastic discussion about being Muslim in Rochester, Minnesota.

 
I learned from this man that as much as non-Muslim Americans fear the radical arm of Islam, this husband and father fears it even more. He feels safe in Rochester but keeps a strict eye on his children and makes certain that he knows every person in his faith community that has contact with his children. He is very involved in actively teaching his children what the heart of his faith is and that killing people to go to heaven for 70 virgins isn’t it.  This man simply wants to care for his wife and children and live in peace. He came to the US from Somalia when he was five years old and is very happy to be here.

One of the reasons I love going to Rochester is because there are people there from all over the world but more importantly because the community itself strives hard to be an inclusive community. This sign greets you as you come into the downtown area.   One of the most interesting things about going                   to the Mayo Clinic itself, however, is that almost any time I sit in the lobby or in a coffee shop, I will overhear a conversation from someone about “those” people.  Once, when a Saudi man walked by me and this obviously wealthy Texan couple, the man looked at me and said, “I can’t believe how many of them are here. It’s just disgusting how they treat their women!” Without even knowing what I thought about it, the woman went on to tell me about a Bible study she was in that exposed what they really believe and how horrible it was. All the while they were talking and expecting my “amen”, I just grew more and more uncomfortable with the conversation and did my best to change the subject and treat them well as their humanness deserved.  I was so caught off guard that I really didn’t know what to say.

I often wonder what these people would have said to the man I met today were he needed to withdraw blood from either of them. Hopefully not one thing but, thank you!  I honestly don’t understand why one would travel all the way to Rochester with such strong feelings about Muslims when the odds are pretty good you just might be seen by a Muslim physician? I guess the docs are rarely seen sporting the Muslim headdress so maybe that makes them less of a threat, I’m not sure.   I do realize that neither of these people saw their views as ones of hatred. They simply saw their perspective as gospel truth that gave them the right to pass sentence.  It’s a very common worldview here in America that too many of us have had for a very long time. It is the worldview that is taught in many congregations and from many pulpits. I think it’s time we challenge ourselves because many of these people live among us and more importantly, THEY are human beings just like us who deserve respect just like we do.

I have a feeling that the next time I’m in a position to respond in a conversation like this, I’m going to handle it a bit differently. It’s time to stop this nonsense and realize America isn’t a white, Christian country anymore and possibly never has been one.  We’re all human beings and we have got to figure out how to see those unlike us in a way that builds bridges rather than fuels the fires that in the end cause all of us a great deal of harm.

Just sayin…

Sitting down at my computer and thinking about how I want to update you, my caring community (which I’m beyond thankful for), I realized that I no longer want to use the word “sick” to define my present journey.

Instead,  I want you to picture me kayaking through the canyons of autoimmune national park. In my mind I’m in this canyon in southern Utah on the Colorado River. I’m in a brand spankin new kayak with an umbrella to shield me from direct sunlight when the water is smooth. The umbrella will be stowed inside somewhere in rough water and I’ll have a wet suit on or something. Whatever.  The main thing is that I will be in the adorable little boat, moving through whatever is to come.

At present the river in front of me is uncharted. I went through the bile acid malabsorption stretch with a very smart guide who gave me a tool to fix that and I am happy to say it’s been resolved, sort of. No one really knows why I am not absorbing bile but it is presumed to be because of the departure of my gall bladder. There is this little bit of information in the background that my small bowel isn’t absorbing multiple things and as the list grows, so does the inquiry.

I have successfully navigated the section of the river that put the last nail in my thyroid’s coffin and found a new medication called tyrocint that absorbs before the small bowel so that I am now sporting lab numbers that make sense. My body is very happy about that.

As I mentioned before, I had hoped to be floating along enjoying the scenery a bit more by this time but oddly, several symptoms have appeared and increased in intensity to the point that I’m parking my kayak on the side of the river for awhile. As the other two issues have stabilized, multiple neurological issues continue to be present and contribute to keeping me in bed or on the sofa about half the time. I do find my way out to the patio swing where I can lay down and listen to the fountain and multiple birds who drop by. Yesterday and today the sound of a pay loader going forward and backing up with its beep, beep, beep nonsense has interrupted my zen but soon the lawns will be in across the street and that nasty little machine will be long gone.

I will head to Mayo again in 3 weeks to see the GI doctor for swallowing and esophagus testing and then see the rheumatologist again to see if it’s time for an immunosuppressant medication and whether it is possible for me as I once took one and experienced liver toxicity after two months of it.

The most difficult aspect of this journey is the way this stuff is messing with my cognitive ability and muscle coordination. The nature of autoimmune diseases is that they flare up and die down. I went all out over the weekend energy wise and participated in life with Dean. We attended a graduation in Cambridge on Sunday and enjoyed seeing Hannah. Yesterday, I could hardly function. On a walk with the dogs I dropped the leash and as I chased after it, I had one of those kind of  drop falls. The kind where you just hit the ground and when your there wonder how the hell that happened. Not only that, but when the neighbor started to talk to me, my words weren’t coming like normal and that was particularly frustrating. So, yesterday while still in my kayak, I hit some rocks and determined to beach it for awhile.

Today is better. My thoughts are organized enough to write this update and I haven’t been down once since I woke up. My goal is simply to be fully present. I’m also constantly singing the new GooGooDolls song I’m So Alive. It was so thoughtful of them to do that just for me….

A few months ago, I found myself just wasted and sick in a hotel room in Phoenix. I was on my way home from Yuma where I’d spent the previous two weeks wading through the healthcare system and waiting for results of a PET scan to determine whether or not my dad had lung cancer. I was very relieved to know that he didn’t and simply attributed my fatigue to the stress of it all. I’d also been dealing with some GI problems and thought I was sick due to that with the full expectation of being just fine once I got home.

A week later, I went to an appointment with a GI specialist at the Mayo Clinic. He’s a great doctor who consulted with us when Hannah was in the hospital in 2014. He’d ordered several tests ahead of our visit including a blood test that told me that Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis was if full swing.  My TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) was also very high.  As for the GI symptoms, I was diagnosed with a condition called BAM (Bile Acid Malabsorption) due to having had my gall bladder removed in 2012. I’ll spare you the details and just say it’s no fun to live with at all. I left his office armed with new prescriptions for a medication for that and and a higher dose of thyroid medication. I came home and expected to get my life back on track. Expectations can be such a set up.

After a few weeks I find myself relieved of the BAM and for that am totally grateful, but I continued to feel pretty wasted and sick most of the time. I returned for a follow up appointment two months later and discovered that my TSH level didn’t drop at all but instead increased. It’s not supposed to do that so I was referred to Endocrinology. They were able to see me the next day.

The endocrinologist determined that my small bowel wasn’t able to absorb regular thyroid medication so I would have to take it in a gel capsule that would dissolve in my stomach. (The copay is $90!) I went home and planned to feel better but instead that happening I actually felt worse. A few days later I woke up  with a lovely bright red butterfly shaped rash on my face which is a classic sign of Lupus. After consulting with the GI doc again,, I was off to see a rheumatologist, a speciality I’m already very familiar with.

This is where things began to take on a whole new level of real for me. I’ve dealt with the reality that I have had autoimmune issues since high school, for over 45 years. I was first tested for Lupus in 1977. I’ve now seen a total of seven rheumatologists and each one has given me a different diagnosis each time.  Based on symptoms and blood tests, I was officially diagnosed with Sjogrens Syndrome and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis in 1992 just prior to a diagnosis of Lupus. All of it has been a long journey of frustration at times because without warning it just hits, the rug is pulled out from under me and I’m in bed for anywhere to a day or several weeks. In light of the last few years (five surgeries in 9 months in 2011-12 and a nasty recovery from a thoracotomy), I honestly thought these drastic autoimmune hits were behind me. After the rheumatology appointment however, it became crystal clear that they are not.

I’m back on the drug plaquenil, have taken a course of prednisone and if all of this fails the rheumatologist is suggesting Imuran, a nasty chemotherapy drug that made my liver go toxic a very long time ago. It sucks. There is just no other way to say it.  To say the least this has really been a blow for me at the beginning of summer, especially the instruction to stay out of the sunshine!

As I have been thinking about this, it came to me tonight that this journey, this roller coaster of a ride through life has taught me a great deal and for that I could be grateful. I’m flexible, patient and don’t get too shaken up when a crisis occurs. I’ve accepted that crisis are just a part of life for the most part. However, in recent days, dealing with the reality that my autoimmune diseases are no longer quiet (they really weren’t…it’s called denial), and that I must deal with them, first pissed me off but as time goes by continues to sincerely humble me. I have come to realize that because I was in remission for quite awhile and because I’ve overcome a lot of traumatic things in my life without the auto-immune thing seeming to even enter the picture, I’d inadvertently reached a point where I honestly thought that I had figured it out in some special kind of way.

I have been rather proud of myself for surviving and attempting to thrive no matter what. My therapist says I’m a badass student of myself and psychologically very healthy, one of her hardest working clients ever. I’ve done a lot of therapy – physical and psychological, I’ve read countless books on healing and made continual life style changes as a result but dammit to hell, I’m still a human being and I don’t really want to be one all that much right now. It unnerves me that  I still need the patience of my husband and children, my friends and extended family,t hat I have to pace myself and that doing laundry is a huge undertaking. I cannot work for my keep or to achieve something profound and that really pisses me off. I just have to live in this beautiful house and have all of my needs met by my generous husband every.single.day…”I am woman hear me roar,” anyone?

I know, seriously?

Tonight, I honestly do want to be grateful.

I want to be aware of the great gift life has been for me in spite of this craziness.

But tonight, I also just feel smashed to the ground and broken.

But tonight there is a new wind blowing, a gentle breeze that says it’s okay to be broken. I am reminding myself that in the past, seasons of brokenness there has always been this place where God shows up, where miracles happen and life begins to make sense. It is rarely a place where I will go willingly. As I enter the outer edges of that place again, I know that I will find my selfish ambitions dust and my proud opinions hallow. But I also know that in that sweet place, a soft light inhabits the space about me, a soft rain drops on me when I’m thirsty and a gentle sun shares its warmth with me and I am just fine. It’s the getting there that is just excruciating.

Since moving to Minnesota in 2005, I’ve been shattered multiple times by one thing or another. Some having to do with the move and some simply with the age and season of life I’m in. The deal is that I reached a point where I had determined that I’d had enough of life’s pain and began to harden myself to it. I haven’t let my heart break open because I’ve been so angry. The deal is that I cannot move forward when I’m angry…I can wrestle and determine that I will be positive and that I will keep moving but all I end up doing is just that, moving, just going  forward.

I don’t want to just go forward anymore. It’s taken this reality of my body fighting the war within itself to wake me up and remind me that with the humble there is wisdom.  I genuinely want to be a wise person. So tonight, I open my heart a little bit more and with that opening attempt to make room for the brokenness that opens up the deep in life that I know is there for me.

If you’ve read this far, bless you.

Well…Sarah Palin will be busy by her husband’s side while he recovers from a serious accident with a snow machine. I’m not sure if that’s a snow mobile or a literal make snow type of machine but that’s irrelevant to this post and I don’t really care. I would like to care. I would like to like her. I.just.do.not.get.her…or maybe I do and that is why it’s so hard.

I pretty much said, “Good-bye” to the Republican party in 2008 when Barak Obama was elected. I was so conflicted in my soul that year that I didn’t even bother to vote. The hot button issue for me was healthcare. Dean and I had borrowed money up to our ears and liquidated our assets in order to put our daughter through life-saving eating disorder treatment. Five years later and by unbelievable good favor of a lawyer in Salt Lake City who was insanely patient, we won our case against United Healthcare and were able to rebound.  The nightmare we lived through those five years was insane. I’m sure it took years off of our lives because dealing with an insurance company whose CEO at the time made $125,000,000 per year in salary and benefits (who was eventually fired for misconduct and is now the owner of a professional soccer team in the Twin Cities) really sucked. In addition we were dealing with an insurance company whose staff was trained to lie, trained to mislead clients and trained to deny claims. So, I guess you could say, Healthcare was a big issue for us in that election.

Facebook was also new to me that year. Remember the days when there were just a few pleasantly placed ads on your newsfeed and most of what you saw were posts from your friends? Well, that was the year when I reconnected with multiple Evangelical friends from home. We’d moved to another state three years before that and had chosen to attend a mainline Presbyterian church by then but friends are friends, right? So…I began to share my thoughts on why the issue of healthcare MUST be dealt with at the government level. At the time, I wanted the REPUBLICANS to tackle it because hey, we all know liberals can’t be trusted to do things in government, right?

As I shared my story, several of my CHRISTIAN Republican friends came unglued, unhinged or just totally lost it with me. It was really unbelievable that they heard so many things that I did not say simply because healthcare legislation was seen as an issue exclusive to Democrats. I had just one friend who actually thought about what I was saying and responded accordingly. We have been really good friends since! When she and I hash out an issue it is a blast because we can get emotional and agree or disagree and go on with life. Such was not the case with multiple people. The concept of being de-friended was strongly attached to my having been influenced by satan (no joke) in light of my liberal politics. It became utterly clear to me that my friends believed that God was a Republican.

Sarah Palin believes that too and as a result she is ooed and awed over by masses of Christian women around the country but all I can conclude is that these same women (and I’m sorry it has to hurt when I step on your toes) like her not based on the total substance of her platform but simply  because she is a Christian. That. is. all. When you talk about the substance of who she is and what she says…they have little or no idea. They know she likes guns. They know she fears God. They know she’s very rich. They know she is pro-life and supports abstinence based sex education… and that is all that is necessary for them.

Seriously, I don’t care what political party you are a part of,  if you are going to run for President of the United States of America, you need to know a whole lot more about a whole lot more. The Republicans I went to college with were really smart people. They were their parents children and they shaped by their Midwestern worldview but they fully engaged their brains when it came to discussing politics. What we are witnessing in the Republican political world is nothing like the party I grew up in. I still hate big government but I hate crooks even more and I especially hate crooks who make 9 digit salaries on the backs of those they insure by denying them coverage when they clearly should pay for it.

Sarah Palin was never meant to be in politics any more than Donald T is. In addition to that, her Christianity is not enough for me. In the mist of fame and fortune, she’s scattered all over the place. She rarely owns her real stuff like admitting that she just doesn’t understand some things very well, and she certainly knows very little about governing. She is on Donald Trump’s platform form as a Christian woman support person. It blows my mind that she, a mother with a special needs child would approve of a man who mocks a disabled reporter in a public forum let alone does all of the things he’s done and says all the things he’s said. The only thing that I can conclude is that she is grossly unaware of the things Jesus really said because I cannot possibly imagine he’s all that excited about what he’s witnessing these days as this election unfolds here in America.

And…God is not a white, male, American Republican…really.

As I approach my 55th birthday, I hope that it can be said of me that I’ve grown wiser, that more and more of who I am in my core self reflects the Christian truths of what modeled my life for over 30 years.  Though my beliefs are much more universal and I no longer see the Bible as I once did, these principles are a part of my soul’s internal compass.

Galatians chapter 5…

²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

I came here to Yuma, AZ, to be with my parents as they deal with health problems. On a Southwest flight heading to Phoenix from Minneapolis, I’m one of the last to board the plane and find a seat. Middle seats are sure to be all that remain open and I know the odds of being near the front of the plane are near zero so I prepare myself to carry my little dog to the back of the plane and find a seat. To my surprise the second row from the front has an open middle seat next to a VERY odd shaped woman with long wavy gray hair, glasses and sporting a new pair of Keds on her very small feet that dangle next to where my knees will be. She fills half of the seat with her head resting just above where my waist will be should I choose the seat next to her which I do.

As Elsa and I had been waiting at the gate, Kathy’s wheelchair had come up right beside us. She greets us with a big smile, as just about everyone does when they see Elsa’s little face and experience her wagging tail as they make eye contact with her. She gave Elsa the reward of a head scratch and we both smiled. As she wasn’t sure how she was going to board with the wheelchair she said she would need to see the agent and told us goodbye. Off she flew in the slick little electric wheelchair that has become commonplace at airports to get her place in the line.

My arrival on the plane was a real boost for me because there was a front seat open and Elsa and I wouldn’t have to navigate to the back with her kennel and my backpack in tow but equally because I thought I would enjoy visiting with Kathy. I knew instantly why the seat was open and I’ll bet you did too. Kathy was different. Her spirit encased in an odd little body meant that the average person would want to avoid her. The man who had taken the window seat certainly had no interest in even looking at her, let alone talking to her. Yet she smiled.

After getting Elsa relatively settled on the floor in her kennel, Kathy and I began to talk to each other. The man on my right talked to me too. Not once did he acknowledge Kathy in our conversation though she had many interesting things to add to it. I feel sorry for him because he missed SO MUCH. Kathy was 65 years old and was born with spina bifida. Her and gainfully employed doing HR work for a company from her house. She was a life-long south Minneapolis resident with a lot to say. She was going to Phoenix to visit a good friend who had found out that she had terminal cancer and had decided to rent a place there for one of her last winters. She was checking things off her bucket list and wintering in AZ was one of those things so every week or two a new friend from up north would join her. This was Kathy’s week. As our plane landed, we wished each other well and departed both lives having been made richer by sitting next to each other on a 3 hour flight.

I share this with you because you may be like the man on my right and all of those other passengers who left her seat open for me. I don’t think anyone purposed to be mean to Kathy. I simply think that even as far as we have come in accepting people with disabilities and empowering them to live their own best lives, for the most part we generally have no idea how to acknowledge their existence with ease.

The fact that Kathy chooses to thrive living in her body shatters the perfect life we see portrayed in the magazine in the seat pocket in front of us. Grandparents with their kids at Disneyland, young beautiful couples taking exotic honeymoon vacations, ads for artificial hair replacement and the nations best dermatologists must be damned if we open our hearts to her, so we just don’t.

The beautiful thing is that life, real honest to God life, breathes more of itself into each one of us if we find the courage to enter into the odd, the unusual and different from ourselves.  Kathy enriched my life yesterday. I enriched hers. Please think about us the next time you see someone like Kathy. If all you can do is establish eye contact and say hello , you will be well on your way to finding the water of life that truly quenches your thirst.

I’m writing this to you tonight because it’s taken me a very long time to realize that you have lived most of your lives in a world, that for a great deal of my life, I knew nothing about.  I only know you because I found myself in desperate need of a perspective outside of my own personal familial tribe about 15 years ago when one of my children was diagnosed with severe mental illness. Staying within my tribe proved to be a lesson in futility very quickly because in my world mental illness was either from Satanic forces or poor choices, both of which were predicated on my husband’s and or my own poor parenting skills. It was a really difficult time for me but one that has utterly changed my life.

As I searched outside of my own culture’s boxes, I met gifted others who could accurately assess my child and intervene in a way that eventually led to much healing and restoration in our family.  Ironically, this was the very thing that my life as an Evangelical Christian was devoted to but had proven unsuccessful in this situation. These insightful authors, teachers and professionals had one thing in common that I would have never imagined myself in need of, a very liberal worldview. But oh, how I did need it and how I need it now. That said, as I attempt to weave my way throughout the whole of my life, it has become clear to me that there is a great deal about the  Midwest, Conservative, Republican, Evangelical side of my life, that those of you living outside of that world, are so far removed from, that I now understand why my peeps hate you so much. In essence, I finally get why you are seen as living in an ivory tower.

“From the 19th century, it has been used to designate an environment of intellectual pursuit disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life.” (from the Wikipedia link above)

I AM now seen as living in that tower with you and yet I know that there is much about me that separates me from you. Let me share some of that with you.

First off, I was blessed to be able to go to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and get a BS in Elementary Education. I was the first person on both sides of my family to get a degree. I was very pleased with myself but I had no illusions about my academic prowess. I got through with a 3.0 GPA but here’s the deal. I have not one memory growing up being assisted in anyway by my parents where homework, support in athletics or music is concerned. They tried very much to be there for me but we were lower middle class, if not poor, for the first decade of my life. I went to five different schools from 4th -7th grades because my dad’s job demanded it. We didn’t have the luxury to stay in one place and keep our roots down in the ground very long. It took every ounce of determination I could muster to get through college and the one and only reason I made it through was that I promised myself that if I started it, I WOULD finish it.

My brother, who is a very wealthy businessman, got there with no college whatsoever. He was mentored by my father whose education had come from his time in the U.S. Air Force and from taking correspondence courses in engineering through the mail. To this day my dad would say that the time in the military saved his life. My brother is incredibly intelligent but he has never had a single class in a liberal arts or any other college. He presently manages several companies and farms corn and soybeans for a hobby.

I am incredibly proud of my family. I am equally proud of my own education and further educational pursuits in another university. I am a voracious reader, love to write and I am fascinated by those other than myself. I love all of this about me and my life but there is an incredible tension that exists in-between these two realities of my existence. So many times when I read the posts from you, my mentors in social justice, the environment and spiritual practices, I am in awe. At the same time, I catch myself saying all too often,

“Do you even realize what it is like to be so obsessed with putting food on your table that you can’t find 20 minutes to read to your child?”

or

“How on earth can you expect me to go green when I can’t even figure out how to pay for the mountain of medical bills from having a sick child -and yes, I have health insurance that I pay for.”

or

“How the hell do you expect me to grow and then cook all of my own food, when I can barely find the energy to clean my own toilet?”

or

“Africa, Ethiopia, Myanmar, sex-trafficking, racial justice, LGBT justice, elder abuse, black lives matter, the family of the cop that just got killed by a psychotic criminal…and the damn list goes on and on.”

The reality that you do not have any idea that as a result of my father and brother’s hard work, well over 100 people have jobs, have food for their children, have clothes for them to wear and might even have some money for retirement when they are old, really hurts me. It all seems lost to you as if you do in fact live in ivory towers so far away from the lives of real people.

This is my real life. It’s not what I read in the papers or see displayed on Fox News. Yes, my Midwestern, Conservative, Evangelical world drives me crazy but it is not made up of heartless savages. Many of my people in that world give thousands of dollars to their churches, to World Vision, to Feed the Hungry, to causes that would astonish you. They don’t expect the government to support those things, they do! They also go dig wells and build houses for the poor and provide medical care for those who have none otherwise. THEY ARE AS CARING AS YOU ARE!

Okay, now with that said, stay tuned because there will be another blog coming that will be written in your defense too. I have no idea what to do with my life where there is much love for both sides but I do think it has come to me for a reason and only time will reveal what those reasons are.

We are so blessed to be free and to be able to live and do as we want to with most of our lives…somehow we just have to find a way forward through the mist…more to come.

This Christmas came and went and all I can really say is, “Good riddens!” Bah, humbug…and all that. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE giving gifts. It’s my love language and I’d rather give a gift than get one most of the time. I love the spirit of goodwill and I love decorating the house and the yard, but really and truly, I am done with Christmas as I have always known it.

About a decade ago we moved away from our Nebraska home out to Logan, Utah. It was a seismic shift in all of our holiday celebrations. Stephen was in college at UNL and it became our priority to simply get him home to be with us. We enjoyed our time together and kept the traditions that were there for the four of us. I fixed cream of broccoli soup, served the cheeseball and crackers and we poured our nonalcoholic bubbly.  Following that we opened our gifts one at a time after the stockings were emptied out. Kirby had his own stocking and faithfully searched for his new bone. Cassie got her new catnip toy and we had a great time together. We felt the loss of the extra Christmases we’d known in Nebraska with our own siblings but adjusted well, sending and receiving packages and making holiday phone calls.

In 2010 we made another big leap and moved to Cambridge, MN. Having just finished my Special Ed student teaching and arriving in Cambridge just after Halloween, we kept our own tradition and celebrated with Stephen flying in, this time with his fiancé Theresa.  All of our traditions fell into place and we had a great time. Stephen and Terri even got to get up on the roof and help Dean scoop the snow off. We’d had around 15″ by then. The four years following that Christmas have taken us through a slow evolution to where we are now.

2011-Christmas almost didn’t even happen. Hannah had moved back to Utah and Stephen and Theresa couldn’t come home.  I’d been in and out of the hospital since October 20th and was finally discharged on December 20th. Our gifts were money and our decorations minimal. We lit an old ceramic tree that was once my Grandma’s and pretty much just made it through that year.

2012-Dean and I celebrated with Hannah and her boyfriend one evening and flew to Austin over New Year’s  where we drove down to San Antonio and celebrated with Theresa’s parents.

2013-Dean and I celebrated with Hannah and her boyfriend one evening and then made a trip to Austin in the New Year with Dean’s parents along.

2014- Dean, Hannah and I drove down to Austin and for the first time in three years all five of us were together once again. As we had to go after January 1, the only tradition we participated in was opening gifts.

So…it appears that the Christmas season where we “go home for the holidays” or where our kids “come home for the holidays” hasn’t made sense to us for some time.  When we left Cambridge in July and moved into this house in Andover, I just did what one normally does and got ready for Christmas. I put up a tree, decorated the house, we put lights outside and really enjoyed the way it looked. EXCEPT…it made no sense at all.

Hannah was off work wanted to be with her boyfriend and his children so rather than ask her to stay with us, we chose to just make Christmas on another evening. We exchanged gifts and ate chili and sweet rolls together. It was a nice time but pretty quick.  Dean and I flew down to Austin for a 3 day weekend and had a really good time participating in Theresa’s Aunt and Uncle’s annual cookie bake. For our Christmas with Stephen and Theresa, we chatted a bit about a gift and Theresa and I hopped in the car and headed to IKEA to purchase it.  We had a great time with the two of them and their friends Steve and Brandon playing cards. It was great.

The deal is that we are no longer a TRADITIONAL family. In fact as Stephen and I were talking he told me that he just hates tradition. I guess thats good because there is no longer anything traditional for our Christmas celebrations…and I’m really good with that for many reasons.

Primarily this is a good thing because trying to maintain the cultural expectations of Christmas in the midst of four lives that have endured multiple seismic shifts over the last decade is utterly impossible. Dean and I have chosen to prioritize time with each of our children and how we do that has to be very flexible each and every year.  The world they each live in, the realities that they each live with in their own world combined with those of ours, simply make holding onto to what was a lesson in futility.

Well, I can guarantee that on December 24 and 25th Dean and I will be doing something together, just the two of us and establishing some kind of tradition with that. It will very likely involve going away on our own. A beach sounds like a good idea. Our decorating is going to shrink enormously. I’m even pretty sure I won’t put up a tree from here on out and I’m feeling really, really good about that.

My New Year’s Resolution is to simply continue to embrace the life that is mine no matter how counter to family tradition that it is.

Recently Facebook was alive with the frenzy created by a pastor, apparently in full use of his brain while the rest of us had left ours on the curb, asking others in a YouTube video, “Do you realize that Starbucks wanted to take Christ and Christmas off of their brand new cups, that’s why they’re just plain red?”  Perhaps this same pastor’s understanding of the world is vastly different from my own. Perhaps he’d had coffee from some off shoot brand of Christian Starbucks, whatever the case, when I employed the full capacity of my brain to discern if Starbucks had indeed become so bold as to actually make a statement that they wanted to take the Christ of Christmas off of their holiday cup, I discovered the guy was…well, not fully informed (and I’m only saying that because I’m trying to be kind…trying) .

In the end there was nothing to his accusations and Starbucks was given ample free advertising.  I guess he also got a lot of attention so I’m sure his narcissist cup is a bit fuller but seriously? When there are so many other places one could put their energy if they want to speak out against Christian persecution. Voice of the Martyrs would be a really good place to start. If you genuinely want to find those Christians dealing with  persecution in the world, the odds are very good that you won’t find them at Starbucks. Try Syria. Yemen. North Korea…Now there you WILL find some badass Christians standing up for their faith and subsequently being persecuted beyond what you can ever imagine here in the good old US of A.  Red cups? Really?

Next we have mass shootings by radicals within weeks of one another. A radical religious extremist Christian heads to Colorado Springs and kills people at a Planned Parenthood Clinic and we do not call him a terrorist? I wonder what the victims and their families think about that.  He took a gun into a public place and shot people!

A radical religious extremist Muslim and his equally extremist wife kill people at a workplace. They are terrorists but this time we have no problem saying so.

What bothers me most of all with this is that each time a horrible event like this takes place, we take no time off to mourn the loss before the gun control folks are posting photos of their guns, memes about the 2nd amendment and the list goes on…Christians were up in arms all over the place.  One person on my Facebook page said, “We’ll let you keep your Starbucks if we can keep our guns”…I nearly fell of the chair. My reply was that if those two issues are even remotely related to each other, we have way bigger problems to deal with.  And it is clear that we do.

What has happened to the heart of being Christian? If you are one, did you come to the faith over a Christmas greeting on a coffee cup? If you lost a loved one in anyway, did you ever need time to grieve? Do you know the Jesus who looked into the eyes of sinners and said, “I have come to give you an abundant life?” Did you never want to go and take that love to those most in need?

17 people lost their lives in these tragedies. that is this many….count them one at a time I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I  people.  They were…

boyfriends

girlfriends

husbands

wifes

mothers

fathers

grandparents

neighbors

friends

co-workers

American citizens

PEOPLE who died. PEOPLE who will not go home for Christmas. PEOPLE who will not open a single present very  likely sitting under a Christmas tree for them. PEOPLE  who will not even get to do something as simple as brush their teeth. THEY ARE GONE.

They are gone and all you care about  in the immediate space after their deaths is keeping your damn guns?

I find myself in the tremendous conundrum of what to do about Facebook.  I can’t figure out how to participate in the daily conversations without living in a state of perpetual grief over what the brand of Christian faith represented there  has become…we seem to have lost the essence of zoe – the life force that oozed out of Jesus wherever HE went. He was living water and we are constantly trying to contain that water in some kind of political package that cannot begin to hold it. Water is always seeking a way out…but I guess if there isn’t any coming out, it might be a good idea to check and see if anything is really in there in the first place. LIVING WATER…it brings life and THIS nastiness, my friends, is not it.  I’m not sure why anyone would want to drink it either.

What has happened to the heart of us?

This is an emotion-driven post that I just have to get out of me…unedited and raw but so be it.

This week has been full of yet more reasons for me to simply tell Christianity to go to hell. Note: I did not say this to Jesus…or to God…but to this beast of religion that has replaced the Divine.

Where do I begin? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, has come out with a ruling about same sex individuals being apostate and declaring that the children of same sex Mormon couples cannot get a baby blessing or baptism in the church. My Evangelical friends and family consider that this is an irrelevant issues because “we all know” Mormons are deceived and they aren’t really Christians anyway because Joseph Smith wasn’t really a Christian and the list goes on as to why this issue is not worthy of any normal thinking person’s time. Well…I’m clearly not normal anymore so I guess that must be why this matters to me.

Next on good ‘ol Facebook comes this video. Seriously? “Starbucks hates Jesus.” Seriously? A man with a t-shirt sporting an image of what Jesus looks like to him wearing a crown of thorns and the word colorblind smacked over his face really believes that because Starbucks, an international company with employees from many of those countries of color, who also makes coffee and its dearly loved pumpkin spiced latte for anyone regardless of color, or religion or gender or whatever as long as they plunk down the cash, determines to pay heed to their ALL of their customers by removing one specific religious greeting from their disposable cups and one can come to the conclusion that, “Starbucks HATES Jesus!”???? Did I mention that this lovely fellow also claims that he’s carrying his gun into Starbucks because they also HATE guns? After watching the theatrical performance I’m asking myself, was THAT what I was committed to for all of those years? Oy vey.

Then as if all this wasn’t enough religious gymnastics for one week, Dear Ben Carson says that the archeologists are likely wrong about the pyramids being tombs and that instead he has concluded, simply from his own mind and understanding of The Biblical story of Joseph in captivity storing wheat to save the Jews that the pyramids were built by him to store that wheat. I listened and said, “What?!, Did he really say that?” Gosh, he really did. Then tonight I read about someone finding out his “testimony” about money from his memoir was made up and how Evangelicals crave those stories so they readily believe them. My. head. was. spinning.

And then tonight it even got more strange when another person I admire shared a piece from a Mormon leader warning of the cost of discipleship being much more costly as the days grow darker…written in 1978 but reposted in light of the LDS church’s recent declarations.  This leader warns that the secular will become more important that following the Lord. I just have to say that I’ve rarely experienced more secularly religious people in my life as I have when I lived among the Mormons…Halloween is HUGE in Utah, mansions on the benches of the Wasatch are like no other, the arts are huge in Utah…secular is very IN there even though drinking, smoking or having sex before marriage isn’t a part of that, believe me, there is plenty of secular going in the land of Brigham Young. Somehow this LGBT issue is secular??

I don’t seem to get it but then I don’t get hardly anything about a lot of things that define themselves as Christian anymore.

I found a spiritual connection when I was a 16 year old and heard about a God who loved me, a man who died for my sins and asked me to follow him. As far as I can tell…most of us have gone so far away from that guy that if there is anything true in following…embracing…living out the life he introduced to us…I’m pretty sure that this isn’t it.

Have we all gone just plain nuts?

I have enjoyed multiple events in my lifetime that psychologists and other mental health professionals would consider traumatizing to me. I say enjoyed with sarcasm so please note that. I didn’t really enjoy anything about any of these events but as I’ve leaned into the wake of reality left behind the waves of trauma a deeper joy really is emerging. It’s a joy fueled with compassion for my self and others that has allowed me to meet some really terriffic people and most of all develop a deeper sense of awe about the reality of what it means to be human.

Trauma is occurring all of the time and in varying degrees of severity. How we receive trauma into our bodies depends on so many variables that dealing with it is definitely not a one size fits all solution. No matter how we react to it, however, these events change us. It’s pure physiology.

No matter how self-assured we are, in a fraction of a second, our lives can be utterly devastated. As in the biblical story of Jonah, the unknowable forces of trauma and loss can swallow us whole, thrusting us deep into their cold dark belly. Engtrapped yet lost, we become hopelessly frozen by terror and helplessness.

Peter A Levine PhD, from his book In An Unspoken Voice

In general I have been a resilient but highly sensitive person. For as long as I can remember I have picked myself up and purposed to grow from whatever negative experiences came my way. And yes, I take most things very personally.  When I perceive that something hurts, I can be easily overwhelmed. I have to understand each and every event that happens in some way before I can let it go. I either have to learn something from it or I have to be able to explain how I let that thing happen etc. I can’t rest until I find a way to make negative experiences okay. No matter how many Serenity Prayers I utter or how much I instruct myself that much of life is out of my direct control, this is still my default way to go. No matter what, letting go of hurt is REALLY hard for me.  It is also really hard ON me, on my body. All this said, negative experiences are generally not traumatic ones. Traumatic events take eveyrthing to an entirely new level.

Trauma came into my life each and every time in this way:

• by surprise – out of nowhere – totally unexpected

My body responded each and every time in this way:

• engaged my central nervous system in the fight or flight response due to intense fear and total helplessness to avoid it
• immobilization in order to protect me from further harm

Research is showing us that if our bodies are allowed to let go of the stored energy from trauma we can begin to heal from it. I’ve been on an almost four year journey of figuring out how to do that specifically related to mulitple difficult events that came into my life associated with the move from Utah to Minnesota. It’s a rather complex story that I’ve been very open about in previous blog posts so I won’t go over the gorey details again here. I will share that the one event that rose above all others and nearly took my life was a minor surgery to deal with acid reflux that ended with my stomach flipping up into my chest wall, a surgeon who neglected to put in a drain after the surgery to repair it and a very large infection that permeated my chest wall and abdominal cavity that required a very difficult and high risk surgery to save my life.

The day it happened I was told at 10:30 am that I would have a thoracotomy surgery that afternoon to fix the problem.  I woke up after the surgery in a state of complete immobilization where I could not move a muscle on my own. Thankfully hospitals don’t allow you to stay that physical state, but the harsh reality is that they are at present virtually unable to intervene in such a way as to unlock your brain from that state.

Though my body began to move eventually with nursing staff lifting me up etc. I didn’t have any grasp that my central nervous system had been so traumatized by the experience that it would keep me going through a continual cycle of threat, a sense that I could not escape, intense fear and helplessness followed by long bouts of physical immobilization in a chair or in my bed. There were mulitple days in which I had no idea why I should remain alive because so many things, even good things, would bring with them such intense feelings of fight or flight that I began to withdraw to avoid them.  The withdrawal led to a long and intense season of clinical depression that took everything in me to work through and come out on the otherside of.

I am certain that ONLY with the help of a husband I loved who would not give up on me and two very skilled and compassionate therapists, was I able to begin to recognize what was happening, do the hard work I needed to do in therapy and then to learn the right kind of self-care for me at various stages of this journey.  It has been a very hard road because so many times along the way, I had to honor the way my body was responding and deal with it the best I could no matter what others thought or how they would assess my decisions.  I grew up a lot in this process! I’m still growing up from it all.

Life is hard. Things happen that we have to learn to overcome or we’ll never make it. Trauma, real trauma that leads to a diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is a different beast altogether and one that we as modern humans don’t really understand very well. This kind of trauma leaves a nasty gift within your brain in the form of a thought-voice that is intent on derailing your progress at every turn. Every single attempt you make to overcome it never silences the voice that warns you to be afraid, to withdraw and to disappear. Recovery seems to be mostly about learning to recognize the voice, learning how to assess it with those trained to hear it and then to experience the ability to move past it on your own.

Today is a pivotal day for me. I am moving forward and will now be an on call basis with my therapist. Today I thought about my plans for the future and heard the voice tell me to drop the plans and run. Today I recognized that this was the voice trauma left behind. I calmed myself, took some time to breathe slowly and behold, the voice was outed and I was able to move on.

It’s still hard for me to not feel shame at being so weak that I wasn’t able to just pick myself up by my proverbial boot straps and move on. Shame that it’s taken almost four years to get here and begin to really overcome this.  It’s still hard that though I’m a hard working Midwest girl at heart and totally NOT ready for the forced retirement I’m now living in, I am worthy of life anyway.

This nightmare that kicked my ass under the bus will less and less determine the quality of my life lived in the present and I am going to face it moment by moment. Florida Scott Maxwell says that when we fully process the events of our lives we become ruthlessly real. As that is my goal…onward I go.

Brene Brown says that when her mom went to therapy to begin working on her alcohol addiction it started a revolution in her family that continues to this day. We ARE a family just like that.

I remember when it started. I think I was in my early 30’s. We were going to a very authoritarian church where one of the leaders wives  approached me and said something to me like, “You have a lot of symptoms of _______ and therefore, I’d like to meet with you for counseling.” I said okay but I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.  I pretty much said yes because she really did recognize the symptoms of some very awful events that took place early in my life and I did want to deal with them. At the same time, her approach was rather shame-inducing and gave me the creeps because I never really knew what symptoms actually tipped her off.  I mean seriously, if I’d been as healthy as I am now, I would have recognized how out of whack it is for a counselor to approach me in this way and never agreed to it. At the same time, I am a firm believer that God does do some kind of magic in the midst of our crazy humanness and this was one of those times.  It was a short season and I moved on.

Several years later, Hannah came to me after a Mother’s Day buffet dinner and opened up to me about her fear of bulimia. That set us on a path of discovery that we have never been able to depart from. First it was a dietician…then a local psychologist…then a hospital inpatient treatment team…then a residential treatment team…individual therapy for her, family therapy for us.  To put it mildly, it’s been a shitstorm of emotional energy that has forced us to go deep because her life was literally on the line for months on end. We didn’t even think about withholding anything back during this process.  Fast forward to the present day, however, and we find ourselves dealing with something most unexpected.

All of this hard emotional work has ushered in a total transformation of our family life that while living in Utah was much easier to handle. It was just the three of us and occasionally our son and both sets of our parents when they would visit. We didn’t have to think even once about our own siblings because we were just too intensely focused on what was in front of us. We had a very unique and wonderful support system in Logan that we didn’t even realize we had until we moved away.

Our growth over the years has required us to become brutally honest with each other.  We sense dysfunction in one another very quickly and address it with equal speed.  We assess much of life itself very differently now that we’ve been in the arena wrestling with our individual and corporate family demons so relentlessly. We value just about everything so differently. We have more stuff but it means a lot less. We have less time with one another but our time together is increasingly more authentic and meaningful.  We are all less passive and compliant and as a result much more assertive. We are each less interested in pleasing others to keep the peace and we’re sincerely not interested in wearing a “game face” and pretending things are okay when they clearly are not. We are certainly not a perfect family, in fact we are all very aware of how much we’re just like anyone else but I guess we’re just a bit more okay with it. Tonight as I write this, I find myself just wishing we would have been warned so we could have been prepared for how all of this growth and change would impact our lives beyond ourselves and our children if we ever returned back “home”.  This summer’s experiences with some of our extended family has ushered in a seismic shift that Dean and I are still trying to understand and figure out how to deal with.

As a spiritual woman, I’m often thinking about the words I spent years reading in my Bible about families and how when Jesus talked about them. It seems that  what he is reported to have said was so very different from what I ever heard from Focus on the Family or at Campus Crusade for Christ’s Family Life conferences where we were gathered primarily to learn what it meant to have a Christian marriage and family.  My observations are that Jesus seemed to usher in a bit of shitstorm whenever the topic of family came up.  He told someone to let the dead bury their own. He told someone else that his brothers and sisters were those in the Kingdom and not necessarily related by blood. He even went so far as to say, I came to divide families. Pretty different from what we think of when we’re picturing how we will relate to one another in families, isn’t it?

What are we to do with what he said if we want to sincerely follow in his steps? I’m not sure, but I can say that if we’re really serious about becoming ruthlessly real, the odds are pretty good that we’ll experience some conflict with those biologically closest to us. We may have the same blood, may have been raised in the same home but we are simply not clones of one another. It would seem that to be most authentic,  we need to acknowledge that and give one another the freedom to be who they really are without interference from us.

In the last decade I have personally had to delve deep to discover how to have a relationship with my own children in light of surreal and very unexpected circumstances. I had to realize that I cannot make either of my children into the Christian people I had envisioned they would become.  Over the years it has become crystal clear to me that real faith exists in the heart and the mind of the individual where only God can actually see. We may have similar culture and church beliefs that we give assent to but they are not our own genuine faith.

As a result of what we’ve learned we live with more authentic and deeper relationships with both of our children as well as many of our friends. We’ve learned to allow others to think through their own truth and be where they want to be in just about every way without losing our love for them. At first it was very threatening to even begin to think and act on this reality but as it became clear that it was essential to our own health and well-being we pressed on.  In every way it has taught us the necessity of two things that are true for us; loving God with our whole being…and loving others as we love ourselves without condition. That’s it. That is our truth both as individuals and as a couple.

Unfortunately, while trying to love God and others, everything continues to be filtered through our culture and tribe. We’ve discovered that each has rules for us to follow in order to be allowed in, each one defining what actions indicate love and loyalty within them. Any deviation and we’re seen as something other and that is simply a very hard place to be. It has become clear to me that  when we grew enough to really heal some things, we may have to break some of these rules and whether we like it or not, we will suffer the consequences.  No matter how hallow or pretentious we find these rules when life and death are on the line, they can remain sacred to our families. Though they are what we first knew and what made us who we are to a large degree, going back to them is not an option because the fires of our life’s circumstances have deeply changed us.

Rising Strong is Brene Brown’s latest book and it’s really all about this process. In reading it I found that it was incredibly validating for me but equally very difficult. I came to see that sometimes Rising Strong literally means rising away from what you thought was your one true solid foundation.

I continue to want a whole-hearted life and most of all an authentic one, like I think Jesus lived his life. I really do want that. I guess, I am still surprised that when he said it would be a narrow way, he really wasn’t kidding. I’m still surprised that there really are crosses to bear. I’m surprised that my mind, my heart and my soul are all required to be engaged in the transformational journey for as long as I live.  Though I would give just about anything to gain a good outcome in the eye of my tribe and culture, the one thing I cannot give up is authenticity.  I just didn’t think it would really be so hard. I just didn’t.

This last month has been a hard one for us where family is concerned.  We find both sets of our parents aging and in need of other living situations. As we’ve approached this new territory  we have discovered  that sibling relationships come back into sharper focus when the magnitude of the decisions that need to be made with parents arise.  The worldview that ran the home the kids grew up in still exists but each one has had  a lifetime of change and evolution as well. A weird dynamic that consists of a combination of what once was and what now is  for each sibling and his/her family enters the room and greatly impacts the decision making. It has been our recent experience that this dynamic is not at all for the faint of heart.

As our families spent time together this past week, it has been clear that we have each had our own adult journey through life and we’re in the season where  our adult  kids are all making their own way in the world just like we had to do.  As we communicate on behalf of our aging parents though, we have discovered that we bring all of who we once were and all of who we are now with us.   Stephen Covey said that when we pick up a relationship after an absence, we will always pick up right where we left off in spite of however much time or experience has passed between us.  At no other time have I witnessed this to be more true than this last month.

Sibling relationships at present still contain the areas of closeness as well as unresolved conflict that was there before we set out on our own.  The real in all of this is that being with your sibling/s in a room with just your own parents takes you home again. In that space you discover your brother/brothers almost all over again. You also discover that where you go from there depends largely upon what happened in that space of forced togetherness. It has the potential to  make you strong on behalf of your parents or blow things apart and leave you silent in the decision making.  There is no way to predict or control either outcome.

Yesterday while I was shopping I came across a book called God-Breathed by Josh McDowell. The title nabbed me because for many many years I would use the term to describe why I believed in the Bible the way I did. The words come from 2 Timothy 3:16 where it says “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;”

The words were originally written in Greek and the word inspired comes from the Greek word theopneustos. Because the shorter Greek word pneō is a part of that larger word and literally means to breathe, to blow or by the wind, many conclude that because The Bible is their scripture, Paul’s writing to Timothy means that the Bible as we know it today is also “God-breathed” and therefore, God’s Word. Consider the book description from Josh McDowell’s website.

The Bible is no ordinary book. For within its pages are the answers to meet each one of your needs and provide direction for your life. Authored by God Himself, the Scriptures reveal the true heart of a God who knows and loves you and who desires for you to know Him intimately too.

Josh McDowell provides clear evidence that God’s Word is living, relevant, reliable, and historically trustworthy. Sharing his own personal story as a skeptic-turned-believer to his recently acquired, never-seen-before ancient scriptural artifacts, McDowell reveals the irrefutable truth: Scripture is historically reliable, and it is undeniably the most powerful document of all time.

Though I haven’t read the content of the book, I think the words above state very clearly the Evangelical perspective of The Bible I had claimed as my own for most of my life. Paul didn’t actually have a Bible in his possession when he wrote these verses nor did he write them in a verse by verse format. It doesn’t seem too complicated to grasp that at first glance.  Unfortunately, Evangelical faith doesn’t always allow for first glances or the simple act of seeing at face value. In order to describe to you what God-breathed even means, I had to go to Bible concordance and Vine’s Bible dictionary.  Even then I found it a real stretch to go from something being inspired to something being literally written by God. The implications of inspiration are very different from those of literal dictation and have an enormous impact on the worldview of the believer.

I want to write about this because my personal experience with the God-breathed perspective is one of it having created a personal worldview that gave me a false sense of ownership and authority over all of mankind. It was as if there was a secret code to everything and God gave that code to the men who put the Bible together when it was canonized and they gave it to me. Everything started to fall apart when some things came into my life that the Bible didn’t have answers for.

Oddly enough, I continue to have faith in God and I continue to carry out a very spiritual life. At the same time, leaving the identity I had created around the view that The Bible was God’s one and only literal word to mankind has been brutal. It’s created much pain between myself and my parents, life-long friends and most of all, has forced me to dig deeper within myself and find the courage to continue with life on my own terms. Even writing that down makes me feel tense because for so long I would have believed by doing so I’ve gone beyond the pale, been deceived by Satan and have now suffered the loss of my eternal salvation. At times it’s as if those thoughts have been somehow wired into my very being and I almost can’t breathe because they just might still be true. I really might be living with all of those very things. It is no easy thing to leave all that you are and have been for something else.

 “Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I lived for way too long afraid of my own mind and its ability to stretch. Hannah’s mental illnesses have forced Dean and me to stretch our minds and therefore rethink our lives. She is alive today, 14 years after the journey began because we were open to our real.  It has been worth every mental stretch mark.

I came that you might have life and have it to the full.

Beware of practicing your righteousness before men, their praise is all you will get…no reward later for that.

If you are perfect, go ahead throw your stones…

Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.

Love one another as I have loved you.

You brood of vipers! White-washed sepulchars (whatever that is)

Consider the birds…

Consider the flowers…

If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out – ya, he said that. I’m not going to do it. Pretty sure it was a metaphor.

Love your enemies, do good to them….

If they don’t like what you’re saying, shake the dust off your feet and move on.

Give without expecting anything in return

He told one man, sell all you have and give it to the poor…in fact a lot of things he said were directed at the person he was talking to along his way in the present moment.  He addressed the one thing that kept that person from experiencing the deepest kind of life.

“Zacheus (that nasty little tax collector up in the tree watching him) come down from that tree…I’m going to feast at your house tonight.”

Get the picture? Jesus, said a whole lot of things according to the gospel writers. At least that’s how they remembered what he said.

Jesus words, encased in a book called the Bible, also known as the constitution of the Evangelical world. A literal, inerrant document that must be followed or doom awaits.

One day after being asked to consider how I approached the Bible, my brain engaged in the art of asking questions of my most sacred of books. The first thing I did the next morning, something I’d learned to do every morning, was to sit in my favorite chair and begin to read my Bible, journal and pray…an Evangelical Quiet Time – otherwise known as my time with God. This day it was with the question of my approach spinning around in my head.  I read the the title of one of the sub-books in the Bible and noticed that it was written in 60 AD. I sat there and went a bit numb. In an instant I realized that I’d been approaching my Bible as if it was an exact eye-witness account written as things happened, certainly not several decades later. It also hit me like a brick that the words were written by men…otherwise known as male human beigns. I had been taught that from the “In the beginning…” in Genesis to the final “Amen” in the book of Revelation, each word was God-breathed. Paul’s disciple Timothy told us that all scripture was God-breathed…literally God’s words. Suddenly, I just knew something was amiss and life has never been the same.

This little experience took place when I was teaching in an Evangelical Christian school where I had signed papers indicating that I believed the Bible to be inerrant and God’s literal word to mankind. It created no small disturbance in my deepest heart. I’ve since moved on and away from that life – I miss it often but I can never go back.

Yesterday, one of our brother’s families gave us subscription to a magazine that’s sole purpose is to convice one that the Bible’s account of creation can be proven by correct seeing. I was mad all day. How is one to continue to have relationship with people you genuinely love who find the need to subversively tell you how misguided you are. Tell it to me straight. Face to face. Let’s have an honest dialog and accept one another’s freedom to disagree. As my friend Mary Ellen would say, “Subtlety is lost on me”.

I’m trying to be focused on what Jesus said.

The Duggar situation is nothing short of a bizare tragedy. My head spins as I consider that Jim Bob and Michelle really thought that they could have an honest reality show with such a secret in their history.  I believe the reason the fall has been so hard and so fast is because their entire enterprise is based on the pretense that reality TV is actually real. It just isn’t.

Real is what the Duggars dealt with when this horrible thing happened in their family. It’s the nasty stuff you and I deal with in the midst of the beautiful and magnificent in our own families.

Real is understanding that having a child is a big responsibility and if you choose to have loads of them, you may just not end up living like the Duggars. Your real may mean you will be poor and on welfare rather than living in a big house, driving Hummers and going on expensive vacations.

Real is falling in the midst of succeeding.

Real is living in a world that is often horrible but just as often utterly amazing.

19 Kids and Counting isn’t a REALITY show but the Duggars are real people.

The show is a production – with producers and those running cameras and arranging sets and planning the script (yes, there is one)

The show is pretending that this really bad thing wouldn’t ever surface because it was dealt with. Real is that it did.

Real is hard.

BUT here’s the hope for these people with souls just like yours and just like mine.

If the Duggars can fully process these events of their life…

just maybe,

like Florida Scott Maxwell says,

they may…

“become fierce with reality”.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”

Stephen Covey is known for reminding us that when it comes to relationships, no matter how much time has passed or life lived in-between, when we connect with someone we always pick up right where we left off at our last meeting. Our brains just take us back to that place and we go from there. I had an experience last week that brought this concept into full view.

I sat down at a table next to a person who knew me when we attended the same church almost 20 years ago. As we started from the place where we’d left off, like Frodo and Sam hiding under a cloak seen as a rock by the soldiers at the gate of Mount Doom, I was cloaked in a past version of myself and therefore, completely unseen.  I have no desire whatsoever to live a cloaked existence but the reality is that if the person talking to me actually really knew me we would not have been at the same table together.

What kind of religion do we embrace when we life is more about being right and getting things correct than it is about actually living?

I returned home and shared a photo of our new home 30 minutes away and closer into the Twin Cities on Facebook. Good friends were congratulating me and asking questions but  another friend from back then sent me a private message saying that he hoped I was “installing the correct lense for life”…followed up by “The main lens that people use is either the lens of the world or the lens of the Spirit.”

I’m still feeling the effects of the Evangelical stun gun.

“Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so…”

“On one hand, I keep trying to catch myself by saying I’m just as blinded by my ‘beliefs’ as these people are”, and yet, I don’t think so.”

Two different people.

One on the political right and from my family.

One on the political left and an acquaintance.

Both people in my life.

Today a photo showed up on my Facebook page that made me want to throw something.  I sat and stared at the photo, considered the source, which surprised me greatly, heard myself saying, “Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so…”

The following is what I’ve realized about these words in my own life. If the shoe fits enjoy wearing it.

A human being’s view of the world begins to develop in utero. Science is showing us that the chemicals that course through a mother’s body during pregnancy, both internal like adrenaline and external, as with alcohol or drugs, literally set up the thinking structure of the human brain as it takes shape. While we develop further and are born, the birth experiences we have impact our view of the world. If our bond is secure, our brain is going to be more free to develop a sense of grounding in the world that is so vital to our mental health and to our ability to process rational thought. We all know that this process of growth and maturation goes on throughout our lives and gives us the lens with which we see and experience the world around us. As there is no template that ensures a one size fits all worldview, we seem biologically set up to disagree and fight it out from the get go. In light of these realities, how do we ever come to understand one another and bring about real change? I think I know but I don’t like it very much.

I believe that in order to really understand another, I have to be willing to enter their world and be open to changing my own mind on something I may hold very dear. It may mean that I will see my own self in a very different light than I did before. The hard cold truth is that this process is simply VERY HARD WORK – excruciating soul work and not at all for the shallow or faint of heart. The reality simply is that only way we can ever reach a place of real change in anything, including politics is to commit to doing the kind of inner work on our own self that can allow us to realize that even at our very best, we see in a mirror with a lot of smudges on it. Even with all of our data, our evidence that demands a verdict and tons of life experiences on board…we never will reach and all-knowing status. But here’s the rub. Our ego doesn’t realize that.

I believe that in order to really change things anywhere, it’s going to require some real letting go of our own selves a lot more, a lot of what goes with our own agendas and adopt a new willingness to really understand. We’ll have to begin to practice the putting down of our own sacred views (especially at key times and in key places) and take the risk of positively entering into the reality of the other without demanding that they become like us in order to do so.  I think it could be pretty painful but I also think it could just usher in a whole new day.

So in conclusion let me just say, “Yes, it truly is just me…and I know so.”

Man’s mind stretched by a new idea never returns to its original dimensions.  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I first saw these words framed and placed on the wall of my ophthamologist’s office in Logan, Utah. Dean and I had moved there after life turned upside-down as a result of our daughter’s eating disorder and co-morbid mental illnesses. We were Evangelical Christians and unbelieveably ignorant of the physical realities of being human. Our world was black/white, all/nothing and either/or.  Being Christian and having an eating disorder invade our family blew the hell out of our life’s paradigm for living.

Prayers prayed, advice given and judgments made about why our daughter was in the situation she was in had to be continually dealt with. Doing so brought us to our knees on multiple occassions. Once we found the strength to stand, we found ourselves in a continual battle royal with friends and family who offered us a strange mix of tangible support and bizare prescriptions for her healing. One thing our faith community did very well was to concoct answers for life’s pain from the air and/or the Bible and often present their  “wisdom” with a sense of authority as if it was God speaking to us.

As I watched my daughter slowly dying before my eyes,  I finally made a call to get her out of town and into treatment. ONLY when we finally arrived with her in the hospital did we find solace. A top notch psychiatrist looked us in the eyes and spoke truth to us that what H was dealing with started in the NICU of the same hospital. Her expertise and guidance FINALLY gave us real direction.

After a week in treatment, the therapist told us that our daughter said she felt safe there but not at home.  She began to ask us if we knew why she felt that way. What do you say? How do you feel? What do you think? You simply begin to question EVERYTHING  and when you do, the truth either answers your questions or your daughter dies. It is really that simple.

Wave after wave of healing light has come to us since those early days but it has not been an easy path. It has required more strength, more deep soul searching  and energy than we EVER could have imagined and the journey has transformed us. As Holmes declares in the quote I shared at the beginning of this piece, our minds were stretched from their original dimensions and we simply cannot go back.

Recently it has come to me that although we can never go back to the faith we once knew, that faith, especially in its earliest days, is still the glue that holds all that we are together. It is not the same in that we are no longer full of certaintly about the details as much as we are the underlying structure, the reality of God in our midst. We have been through so much, really too much for any group of nonprofessionals in the field of eating disorder recovery or mental health to begin to deal with. However, even there, among the professionals in our local community, we found gross ignorance where treating eating disorders was concerned. Had it not been for the insight given to me when I was sitting at my dining room table with my Bible open and tears falling on the pages, I would never have had the courage to purse treatment that I knew was going to cost well over $150,000 before it accomplished its purpose. God is very real and alive to me. Religion is not. It is now that simple.

The reason I made the title of this blog entry about judgment is because I have realized that though I have been through the many events that went along with all of this, what I must confess and turn around is the intense judgment I have put onto the Evangelical faith as a whole. I lived in that faith for almost 30 years before any of these events took place and it was there where I met God in very personal ways. I was an idiot much of the time in the way I often thought that I had answers for others, in the way that I thought of myself as enlightened and above others who didn’t really get it like I did. Ya, that was me, BUT the me that was in that place was also very sincerely in it. I loved worship and I loved praying with people…reading the Bible…loving and serving others. By focusing on the actions of those who were misguided or ignorant and treated me badly, I have discovered that I run the greater risk of become exactly like them by judging them and the overarching faith they participate in so very harshly in return. By declaring the far right Evangelical unworthy of my tolerance at least, but my embrace as a human child of God at best, I have discovered that in way too many ways, I have become much like the ones I have judged so severely. Didn’t Jesus utter the words, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do?”

IF you are reading this and you have felt the sting of my judgment toward you, please forgive me. Though I am no longer an Evangelical because much of the doctrine and practices no longer make sense to me, and though we will likely not agree on many things, I do think it is safe to say that we both have as our aim to love God with our whole heart and to love others as ourselves, don’t we?

As I move on from today, it is my aim to embrace those from my past as fellow travelers and not as my enemy. I am forever wounded and will bear the scars for life because we were within a razors edge of losing H as a result of our ignorance and misguided faith. I will not easily trust specific people unless they are able to seek to rebuild that trust with me, but no longer will I judge you so harshly. It would seem that God has spoken to my heart and that is simply not possible anymore.

It is no secret to anyone in my circle of influence that I am so in love with all things…well, many things Utah. It really makes no sense whatsoever because…

I’m not Mormon

I’m not a Conservative Republican

I do not ski (yet)

I’m sure there are more things I am not when it comes to Utah but for whatever reason, when that plane lands at SLC and I make my way out of the jetway…I am home. As in the depths of my being solidly grounded in myself, home.  Over the last five years well meaning friends, family and therapists have attempted to help me understand that this, whatever it is, cannot be healthy for me. To these voices in my life I can only say, “whatever”.

I was met at the airport by dearest friends Craig and Tammy; a retired fire fighter and a master teacher who have used their best gifts in professional lives of service to mankind. Craig was nearly taken by a boogie boarding accident when fierce waves slammed him to the ocean floor followed by two more that didn’t allow him to reach the surface. His last thought was “I hope somebody finds me”. Two nurses came to his rescue in minutes, did CPR hard enough to break his ribs and bring him back to us. He is now living with deep awareness of that the thin space between life and death.

As we headed to Logan, they took me to MY favorite restaurant in Ogden. They planned to do what I loved. In fact taking me to places I loved seemed to bring THEM as much joy as it did me. Throughout the days I was there we would run into their people and all everyone could talk about was the accident and their gratitude that Craig is still here among us. These two live simply, love much and I am always at home in their presence.

I hadn’t told anyone I was going to Utah because I really wanted to spend time focused on the Pettigrews. So when life happened and surprise visits came my way I soaked them up. Tammy spent a day taking her aunt to a doctor’s appointment in Ogden so I ended up spending a day with my dear Mormon sister Shawna and her three kiddos. When you live in a religious culture other than your own, the hardest part is how the “others” treat you. I have to say that Shawna has shown me what real human connection looks like apart from dogma and law. We both have a strong faith in God and it enhances our friendship but we’ve never once tried to convert the other. We enjoyed a slow day with her kids ended by dinner at Chili’s. It was a beautiful day.

Then there was time with Sherrie. Sherrie and her wife Michelle are the poster children for gay marriage in Cache Valley. When the window opened for them to marry, they were the first in the county to do it. The local paper put their picture smack dab on the front page and as they gave the paper the right to use it, anytime marriage equality shows up in the news…there they are. Sherrie is also Buddhist. From the minute I walked into her life for a massage many years ago, we have been friends. I have yet to experience a massage from anyone that brings the balance and healing to my body as one does with her. We dropped into Caffe Ibis for a bit after my massage and Michelle showed up just in time for a hug. Zen…

And then of course there was the land…a drive up Logan Canyon to Bear Lake on a clear sunny day refreshed me in too many ways to count. Daily seeing the favorite peaks from the valley floor in Logan it was as if each one said, “Welcome home, we’ve missed your gaze”.  All of these places were a refuge for me when life was really tough and therefore, they are etched into my heart and soul.

I returned home to a house in Minnesota without the happy face of my Kirby dog greeting me as I walked in from the garage.  Part of the fun of going away is coming home and meeting him at the door. After much emotion was cried out last night, I am feeling a little better. Life’s pain in all things seems to be equivalent to its joy in all things.

If you’ve made it this far through my emotional babbling (particularly grueling for my Minnesota friends) please take this with you. Even if it often hurts like hell, living and loving deeply is what life is really all about, so just do it.

So, we are in the hospital again. Yep, Hannah’s in, I’m in. Thankfully we aren’t roommates with the IV team poking us simultaneously or anything weird like that. I’m just a mom. She’s just a daughter. We’re bonded and have a special grace between us when we are in a hospital room together.  Regular life has been a wee bit more challenging but in 28 years we have made it work no matter what. My new term for our resolve is “stubborn gladness”.

Stubborn gladness doesn’t mean that you are happy when things go well: it means that you fight your way to the light in ALL CIRCUMSTANCES!  Elizabeth Gilbert (from her FB page today)

These words actually reflect the determination in my heart to face my life – whatever it actually is now, or has been, and find my way to the light. I am this way because I grew up the daughter of two people who came from very difficult circumstances and pushed their way through them until they found the light. Over and over and over, in circumstance after circumstance, my parents are people who overcome.

The Great Depression and World War II had left intense grooves in the psyche of my grandparents and their parents. Poverty and PTSD are cruel task masters and leave marks on everyone within their circle of influence. My parent’s lives were no exception. Statistics would have said that my parents wouldn’t succeed in life but somehow they figured out a way. They did it anyway. Until I read the quote from Elizabeth Gilbert today, I didn’t know what to call this force that continues to push me forward when I am sorely tempted to throw in the towel.

Last December found me depressed in a way I had never known before. I got a therapist. I exercised. I took trips to visit close friends and family but all efforts proved futile. In fact I cut my trip to Utah short by a full week because I was so ill. At the time I honestly thought I was just resisting the reality that I didn’t get to live there anymore. It’s no secret that Cache Valley and the Wasatch Mountains are my sanctuary. I returned home ill and broken. The depression would not lift and I’ve been on antidepressants since 2004 when our world turned upside down putting H in treatment. Then my body began to act like it was starting to fail in ways I couldn’t quite articulate. I honestly feared for my sanity.

I saw the pain doctor for a check up and she determined I needed more nerve blocks and that it was time for me to go on Lyrica to numb the nerve pain. I had no peace whatsoever with that direction so I followed my gut didn’t fill the prescription.  I continued to pursue “the light” feeling as if I was hanging on for dear life sometimes. I made an appointment with my general practitioner simply wondering if there was something else amiss. After describing my symptoms he ordered blood work and low and behold there was a chemical problem in my body. As a result of the crazy surgeries I’ve had my food goes through me to quickly not allowing vitamin B12 to be absorbed in my body. In addition to that, our brutal winter had kept me inside so much that I also had a vitamin D3 deficiency.  Regular B12 shots and vitamin D pills have worked their magic and I came home to myself sometime this summer.

In late August Hannah’s digestive issues started to overwhelm her and saw the GI doctors at the Mayo Clinic. I had just started to prepare for a year with the Minnesota Reading Corps and was SO looking forward to normal. I am pretty sure I need to remove that word from my vocabulary because really, there is no such thing anymore.

One morning, as I struggled to get out of bed, the familiar mantra of depressive thoughts began to go over and over in my well trained brain.

“I hate how dark it is here”, “I have no purpose anymore”, “maybe I should just sleep some more”

Then all at once light broke through my woe is mes and said,

“It’s time for YOU to get up and live YOUR life.” followed by Steve Jobs saying, “Don’t waste your time trying to live somebody else’s life…”

So I got up.

I am now living what IS MY life.

I am the daughter and daughter-in-law of aging parents and living within a days drive means I may need to hop in the car and go to Nebraska.  When I get there I may or may not get to see dear friends or play with my niece’s kids. I’ll be busy going to doctor appointments or sitting in the hospital with mine or Dean’s parents. We went back 3 times this summer simply so we could have visits with our parents and family away from these realities.

I am the parent of a daughter who started life with a 2 1/2 month stay in the hospital after I had spent that one month before in it. A daughter who has spent way too much of her young life listening to beeps in the night and being asked to rate her pain on a scale from 1- 10. And the worst part continually having to tell complete strangers about her bodily functions to the point that it’s almost easier to say, “Hi, I’m Hannah and I had a BM at….” you get the picture. A daughter who has a brain severely traumatized from early medical trauma before the figured out that BABY BODIES DO REMEMBER whatever they endure.

I am the parent of a son and daughter-in-law who live in Texas and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sacrifice 5 volunteer hours a week while on vacation to please the Americorps part of Reading Corps. Words can hardly describe how much I miss them. Stephen and his dad’s chemistry – well Dean’s and my children’s capacity to find the most stupid things humorous is such a boost to this mama.

So…this is ME too. I grew up in a home of stubborn gladness even though much of the time it appeared to be other than that. I created a marriage and a home where stubborn gladness is the air we breathe. So…today, I’m finding the light here at the Mayo Clinic’s Methodist Hospital that is a beehive of activity during the work week and a place of Zen tranquility over the weekend. I’m enjoying their beautiful gardens and fountains and friendly people. Oh, and I’m writing. Could life get any better today? Yes, it could but it doesn’t have to. The light can come in wherever I am and I will continue to pursue it with all of the stubbornness in me!

Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Hannah’s  7 1/2 hour surgery is complete. The surgeon said he wasn’t sure how Hannah has even been able to eat like a normal person because the small bowel from her stomach was completely stuck to the abdominal wall, went around part of her back and was also stuck to one of her kidneys. He freed that up but had to removed that section of the bowel because it was so damaged. He said it had basically stopped working and gravity was the main force taking food down into her digestive tract. She’s likely been miserable for a long time but since it was her “normal” so she didn’t know any different.  He told us it was his most difficult case yet for a surgery like that.

We have been out of the waiting room for awhile and even had time to stop at a nice restaurant, eat some great dessert by a beautiful fountain and just enjoy a sunny beautiful day.

Thank you so much for caring for our family with your kind words, thoughts and prayers.

28 years ago on August 21 my water broke. I was 13 weeks pregnant. I had a less than 1% chance of my pregnancy continuing to a place where I would deliver a healthy baby. God came to me in a very special and unique way during that time. I was studying a Psalm with a friend and as the verses went over and over in my mind, I chose to believe that God was speaking to me as to what God’s will was for my baby and for me.  These were the words that permeated my thoughts that day and words that would carry me through until the day she was born on December 2nd at 28 weeks.

1-My soul waits in silence for God only;
From Him is my salvation.
² He only is my rock and my salvation,
My stronghold; I shall not be greatly shaken.

My soul, wait in silence for God only,
For my hope is from Him.
⁶ He only is my rock and my salvation,
My stronghold; I shall not be shaken.
⁷ On God my salvation and my glory rest;
The rock of my strength, my refuge is in God.
⁸ Trust in Him at all times, O people;
Pour out your heart before Him;
God is a refuge for us. Selah.

As I look back on it now, I feel as if it was a holy visitation. A season of life where God became so present in my great need that I experienced a continual sense of that mysterious presence with me. Slowly others began to experience it too. We walked through the amniotic sac sealing, breaking, sealing and breaking again I think 3 or 4 times before it finally broke all the way in mid-November. By that time I felt carried and absolutely sure that I would have a baby girl when all was done.

After attending a women’s event at my church this same presence gave me a name for my baby. The speaker’s topic was about a woman in the Bible named Hannah. When she shared with us that the name Hannah meant full of grace or to show favor and I knew in a very clear way that this was the name of the little one in my tummy. As time went on and we would go through each day, the impressions only got stronger and others came my way to share with me what was taking place in their own hearts as they prayed for this baby. It was truly one of the most profound spiritual seasons of my life.

The day she was finally born, December 2, 1986, was an amazing day. When I woke up (the epidural didn’t take on my left side so I had to go under for an emergency c-section), I was presented with a polaroid (remember those?) snapshot of a perfectly formed little girl that my husband had been privileged to named Hannah. It was very surreal in light of the fact that the last thing I heard from my doctor as he spoke to the other doctor assisting him was, “I have no idea what we are going to find in here.” Much to his surprise he’d found a perfectly formed little Hannah.

Later that day I met the neonatologist when I got to touch her through the little hole in the incubator. He looked me in the eyes and soberly said, this little one is really a miracle. With no fluid to fill her lungs for those last 3 weeks they were on the verge of turning plastic-like. He sincerely believed that another 24 hours and we would not have had a baby. It was stunning, profound and most definitely incredibly real.

It was a month before I got to hold Hannah. I used a breast pump that resembled the milking machine I’d seen at work in my uncle’s barn. A machine like that definitely does not promote the warm feelings that come with being a nursing mother. It was crude and lonely sitting in the room doing that task every so often. The nurses would take my tiny amount of milk, put it in the fridge and wait to use it for her. It was my only tangible connection to this beautiful baby during that month of waiting. Traveling back and forth from the hospital in Omaha to my home in Norfolk (2 hrs away) my heart was fractured between two worlds. The surreal presence that surrounded me subsided and as hormones kicked in my reality became a tight rope of stressful living.

In late January, just a week or so after I had held her, we received a late night call telling us that Hannah’s abdomen was severely distended and that it might be good for us to come down the next day. Dean stayed home to work as finances were incredibly tight and Stephen needed some routine to his little life. I arrived at the hospital the next morning to see my little 3 lb. baby looking like a starving child in a third world country with the added tinge of blue in her skin. Tests were being run to discern what wad happening. Earlier in the week they had determined that she had a milk protein intolerance which included my breast milk. She was placed on a predigested formula with hopes that the blood in her stool would disappear.  The loss of the hope of nursing her was a big one but nothing compared to what I witnessed that particular day. I stared at her and held her head in my hand and did what I could to comfort her at a distance.

The next morning when I arrived at the hospital I was greeted with, “Has the doctor seen you yet?” fateful words every parent in the NICU understood as part of a second language you learn in the trenches. There had been three shift changes since I had been there the night before and the nurse I’d left my phone number with forgot to pass it on. No cell phones back then. As they began to fill me in on her condition I was just stunned. Her colon had constricted due to a disease called necrotizing entero colitis – NEC. It was described as common in preemies whose bowels weren’t ready to absorb food and functioned as if gangrene had set into the bowel. I signed papers and within a few minutes she was whisked off to surgery. Hannah returned sporting a double barrel colostomy where one part of the was bowel exposed and tied into the abdominal wall with the other end exposed providing an opening for stool to collect in a very small plastic bag. lt was all very surreal for me to experience by myself. In the weeks to come I would learn to change the colostomy bag on my own and keep a clean vaseline gauze on the other. Two more bowel surgeries followed and in July everything was put back into place.

Hannah’s life has been full of doctors and hospitals. In addition to these surgeries…

• she was hospitalized after being home for 2 weeks with an RSV pneumonia
• had 3 surgeries on each ear during elementary school.
• At 14 she was diagnosed with major depression/severe and bulimia nervosa and admitted to the Eating Disorders Program at Children’s hospital where the psychiatrist told us we needed to understand that her depression and eating disorder were intricately related to her experiences in the NICU.  She arrived on the verge of cardiac arrest from electrolyte imbalance. Two weeks into her stay internal bleeding caused her to be hospitalized in the Med/Surg. wing after the discovery that her hemoglobin level was down to a 3.9 with 12-13 being normal.
• After two attempts to return to Norfolk we were told that if she did not go into residential treatment she would die. We put her in residential treatment in Utah for 11 months and hoped she would be able to return to normal life after discharge. Knowing what we now know about how the brain responds to trauma, it makes sense that a full recovery hasn’t been completely possible.
• In high school her kneecap popped off of her knee and lodged into the side part of her leg. A similar injury had occurred when she was 12 and jumping on a trampoline. We learned over time that this happened due to a birth defect with the tibia and fibula twisted incorrectly below the knee. In 2011, to correct this, her doctor in Utah twisted them back into the right place and inserted two large screws to keep them in place. It was the first surgery done completely away from us and I am sure it was harder on us than it was on her! Her knee functions beautifully now!
• Since living in Minnesota Hannah has been in outpatient treatment at the Emily Program on an ongoing basis. Insurance coverage for Eating Disorders is mandatory here. In addition to their support she also spent two periods of ten days each in the behavioral health unit at the University of Minnesota Riverside Hospital. There she was assessed, reassessed and given the tools to live at each stage of her journey. Her major issues are major depressive/severe and generalized anxiety disorder. Our family is committed to embracing mental illness in the same way we would any of her other physical illnesses. The brain is an organ like any other in the body and needs to be respected with equal understanding.
• 18 months ago or so, Hannah went in for a partial hysterectomy. When the ob/gyn went to do the surgery she inserted her camera and it went right into her small bowel instead of an open abdomen. Her doctor called in another surgeon and he spent 2 hours reconnecting her bowel in that spot. When the ob/gyn came to meet me in the waiting room she was literally shaking. She informed us that the entire bowel was glued to her abdominal wall and adhesions were encasing everything. A colorectal surgeon was consulted. He encouraged her to wait at least 6 months for the next surgery where he would work in tandem with the other doctor. Her pain was significant so 4 months later the surgery was scheduled and after almost 3 hours was successfully completed.
• At the end of May she went to the ER in excruciating pain and discovered she had a bowel obstruction. After a week with an NG tube and no food she was discharged only to return a few days later. Upon discharge the only instructions the doctors she was seeing would give her was to eat soft foods. Upon hearing that my parents pastor had surgery at the Mayo clinic for a very similar situation, she sought a consult here. Now she is in surgery with her parents in the waiting room.

It seems that the waiting room is where we have lived since August 21, 1986, when my water broke. The experience of my pregnancy with Hannah was a time when God’s presence was very real to me as well as to others in my life but everything turned a corner when mental illness came into our lives. It is utterly impossible to navigate the world of the brain from a spiritual perspective only, especially a black/white, either/or, all or nothing brand of Christianity that we had known and taken leadership in since high school.

In order to save Hannah’s life Dean and I have had to be open to confrontation and influence from others about our daughter, our family and our lives in general. We have had to be continually persistent with efforts at communication with professionals: the schools, the therapists, the doctors, and even the lawyers. As there is no clear communication with United Healthcare when it matters most, lawyers are simply required. BUT by the time you acquire them you have learned yet another new language and taken your ability to confront others at an entirely new level.

Having been blessed with Hannah in our lives Dean and I have had to dig very deep inside of ourselves and find the strength to move on.  The last 27 years of our lives have been lived leaning in and participating in her recovery journey. She will never be like she would have been had my water not broken. She will always be her own unique self though and we will actively be her parents until we are no longer on the planet. God has made us deep people – we hardly ever take things at face value and we rarely cling very solidly to anything because the pull away from things can be excruciating and painful.

The stress that has come with this reality has been largely beyond anyone’s actual control but it has taken a huge toll on my body as the primary caregiver for Hannah over the years. In 2008 as I was strongly encouraged by someone to continue to live MY life and pursue my own dreams, letting go of Hannah as an adult, I did that. I went back to school at 49 and tried desperately to reignite my teaching career. I went to work and discovered that my inner landscape is vastly different than it was when I was a classroom teacher. Surface things make me crazy. Nonconfrontation and action nearly sends me into a catatonic fit – really, I’m not kidding. Change is the one constant in our lives and I’m really struggling living in a culture that is bent on preserving the past and keeping families all together. I often don’t even know what to talk about when I’m in a group especially if it’s just polite conversation. When you’ve been to hell and back a few times, the earthly, temporal world of men seems quite shallow. It doesn’t mean that it IS necessarily it is just that I’ve been hyper-focused on the depths and that’s honestly where I am most comfortable now.

If you have made it this far into my blog for today, thank you. I just needed to get it out of me as I sit here in yet another, “Waiting Room”.

Suicide is of course a choice. No one can end their life without choosing to do so. I’m choosing to write this blog entry this morning. I chose to sleep until 8:30 this morning. The only thing a choice is, is a space between what we think and what we do. That is it. 

I come from parents who have made hard choices their entire lives to get out of poverty. They didn’t do it by going to school and finding a professional career, they chose to do it by invention and production because invention and production were what they knew. Was it a wrong choice? Apparently not because today they are wealthy and enjoying a nice retirement, which by the way did not come to them by choice. Retirement was something they rarely thought about or planned for. They are in a sense living a nice life by the outcome of other choices in their lives. 

My mother has 5 siblings. Her world was beautiful and peaceful until her father got out of World War 2 and came home. There were no psych evals for Vets back then. They just arrived home. He was a loose cannon full of rage and compulsions for things. If his compulsions weren’t satisfied, he beat the hell out of his wife and children. To this day his legacy of choices to deal with his pain through violence to others affects me.

Most of my aunts and uncles are as dysfunctional as the day is long. The two boys that came first after the war were mercilessly beaten, one was just 6 weeks old. They are both still living and in their 60’s but their lives are not very pleasant. I have yet to understand why their circumstances haven’t caused them to choose to end their lives. My guess is that horrible lives are what they know so they simply continue to live them. There is no substance abuse because my grandfather was ruthless in his condemnation of alcohol and was a highly moral man who served on a church council. Simply put neither of my uncles allow for those kind of vices. Success was never something they understood how to carry very well. Living a bare bones existence is normal for them. It is clear that they are choosing to live the way they do.

My mom is very different because for three years her brain was nurtured in a loving secure home. She was well fed, cared for when sick, told stories and played with by the adults in her life. Her younger sister is different because she wasn’t dealt the severe blows in rapid succession that the older kids endured. Their choices in life have been completely different. 

When we say that someone is mentally ill enough to commit suicide, what we are really saying is that for some reason their ability to make sound choices has been compromised. Artistic, highly sensitive people operate out of a place in their brains that is very different from the place the technical, concrete more absolute thinking people do. Both types of people have the potential to make choices differing from their brains natural bent but it is largely unrecognizable to them without much effort.  

I am a natural at thinking from the sensitive side of my brain. I experience feelings long before I experience any logical thoughts. Being sensitive has also meant that I’m a very spiritual person. I experience my environment from a sense of feeling my way through it long before I ever consider the functionality of it.  My husband is just the opposite. He rarely feels first. He has deep spiritual inclinations but primarily he operates from a logical framework. He likes the yard to look as neat and tidy as possible because it looks orderly to him. I like how it feels when I look at the green grass and the flowers blooming. Staying together for 31 years has meant that we have both had to make choices to jump over the mental fence and see the world from the others perspective. If we thought that our individual way was the only real or right way to see the world, our marriage would have ended at hello. 

When someone commits suicide, you can be sure that their choice has been greatly influenced by which side of the brain they come from. I think about a scene from the Shawshank Redemption when the warden commits suicide. He does it because he’s a horrible man doing horrible things and got caught in way he can never escape from. He logically ended his life because he knew his time was up in the real world. He knew that if he continued to live, society would demand that he pay for his crimes. He wasn’t about to pay and could have cared less about what he did to his loved ones. That is a purely logical choice. 

It’s a very different choice when you are dealing with mental illness, especially depression. In that space you sincerely think that you are saving others. You believe that you are saving them from the pain of YOUR own life.  You are deceived when you make that choice. You have believed many lies about yourself and your life, and in a very real way you see that removing your life from others is best for everyone. So in a very concrete sense, it is true that do make the choice.  Every mental health professional knows that and they work very diligently with their clients to teach them how to make good choices. They daily help them move into their logical thinking brain and away from their abstract ethereal sensitive brain. It is hard work for both the provider and the patient. 

I believe that if anything is going to change, we need to first be patient with those who do not understand mental illnesses. In my work with parents of girls with eating disorders, I often had to spend time extra time with logical concrete parents explaining in logical concrete ways what actually happens in the brain when their daughter’s engage in certain behaviors. The love many of them had for their daughters allowed them to find space to listen to me and when they listened they found a way to overcame their resistance to the absurdity of not eating or making yourself throw up after you do. In the end everyone benefitted. 

It is rarely helpful to yell at each other from one’s own side of the brain, shaming the other for not getting it or having ridiculous ideas about it, isn’t really very helpful in the end. In fact, it often just digs us in deeper. Coming to an understanding of mental illnesses hasn’t been at all easy for me. I’m not a professional psychologist. I’m just a mom who deeply cared for her daughter and a teacher who has deeply cared for her students with mental illnesses. As a highly sensitive person I find it very hard sometimes to comprehend the world of those not like me but at the same time have found that it is not an impossible thing to do. In fact it’s been quite enriching for me. It’s allowed me to embrace others not as enemies but as other humans along the same road through life as I am. In conclusion, we desperately need one another’s perspectives if we’re ever going to heal this great divide. 

Robin Williams death on the heels of a friend’s death from similar circumstances brings home to me why I am ruthlessly committed to openly sharing what I have dealt with over the last decade.

I’ve written a lot about our family’s journey with our daughter, her severe depression, anxiety and eating disorder and how we as her parents coped with it all.  I’ve shared how we battled our insurance company because even though she was at death’s door, they refused to approve coverage. It took a 5 year court battle but they eventually paid and thanks to our attorney and a district court judge, they really did pay. It has been a long road. It continues. 

I’ve also written a lot about what I’ve personally gone through this last 3 years. PTSD and clinical depression relating to multiple life events that turned my world upside down and nearly took me off the planet. It’s been hell. 

So why do I spill my guts on a blog and talk about these things openly? It is because I strongly believe the brain is an organ of the human body just like the heart, the liver or kidneys.  Hannah was born at 28 weeks after my water broke at 13 weeks. It sealed and broke a few more times and she made it here via an emergency c-section. The real deal is that her brain took a real beating, our bonding took an enormous hit and it is absolutely nothing she or anyone else should ever be ashamed of. She was born with odds of LESS THAN ONE PERCENT. Dean and I know better than anyone how much she suffered before she ever saw the light of day and then again before she ever saw the outside of the hospital. At the time she was born skin to skin bonding wasn’t even practiced. I didn’t hold her for a month. Her first few years were constant stress for our family as she was in and out of the hospital. It impacted her brain. When the chemical changes that came with puberty hit her brain, it had nothing for her. She was on the highest dose of Zoloft that was generally prescribed and only when it was increased 50 mg. did she finally return to us. It was not a demon as some suggested, it was not loser parents having abused her, it was a brain depleted of all its ability to cope with stress. I simply refuse to be ashamed of one single part of her life. She’s incredibly resilient and determined and I thank God for every day she is here with us. 

When I started to struggle, I wasn’t about to hide it. I’d spent 3 years as a Parent Advocate at a residential treatment center where I met many different girls and their parents and with each one, I refused to treat them with anything but grace. They were/are amazing young women in a culture that is full of incongruity and double standards. I can say with full assurance that not one of those girls or their families experienced shame from me or anyone who worked with me.

What is heart breaking to me is that in situation after situation, those with mental illness not only suffer from the disease, they suffer from a public that considers them primarly people who make bad choices. We rarely saw fund raisers for girls in treatment. No pro athletes visit the treatment centers with gifts for the residents. Yet these families, are selling property, cashing in retirement accounts and borrowing as much as possible to save the lives of their daughters. When their daughter returns home they may even have had to move into a smaller house or apartment.

All too often, those with mental illnesses suffer in shame and silence. Oddly enough, after they commit suicide, there is a often a celebration of the life they lived at their funeral because no one wants to talk about how they died. Though that is commendable and very, very appropriate, I wonder what it would be like if all of us could learn how to celebrate the lives of the mentally ill while they are living among us. 

When we moved into this house someone asked Dean if he knew there was a transition group home next door. Oddly, I’m sure, he said no but that he was fine with that. For us the house next door is celebrating the life of those who are ill. They have a bbq every Thursday at noon with another group in the backyard. I love watching them play bat mitten. They are in the sun, they are laughing and competing without melting to pieces. It’s beautiful to me. 

I am committed to normalizing mental illness because it is really just a part of being human. So, I will not only talk about it in my writing or Facebook posting but I will do what I can to welcome those with a brain dysfunction into my circle when they come into it. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Ever. 

Notes from Luke 4 that I find incredible.

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit…

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.

Someone handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

He found this and read it, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.

He must have read it with great intention OR the power of the Spirit was on him like he said because all of the eyes around him were “fixed upon him”. He told them that today…that day this scripture was fulfilled in their hearing.

All spoke well of him and were amazed at his gracious words and then they asked, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”

THEN JESUS TOOK OFF…

Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician , heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard you did in Capernum'”

“I tell you the truth,” he kept talking

“no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” more talking

THEN he tells them about a widow and Elijah and THEY GET FURIOUS.

Here’s what he said. “I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. YET (my caps) Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon.”

Israel was where his own people were and and likely where it would have been expected that he would go if he was to encounter something miraculous.

Jesus pointed out that he didn’t go there.

He also said another prophet named Elisha didn’t go there either – only this time it was to heal someone with leprosy. He said not one of the Israelites were cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian.

All of which got Jesus in some really big trouble at church among his hometown folks.

At the time I read these verses I was teaching in a Christian school – my daughter went into inpatient treatment for a mental illness. I was devout but asking a lot of questions. I noticed a book on a shelf at the hospital written by a Jewish mystic. As I read some of it I remember the author talking about how God will come to those willing to receive the work of the Spirit. Shortly after reading that I came upon this story in Luke 4.

Since that time I’ve been thinking a lot about Jesus and faith; about a decade. I have come to believe that Jesus – the Holy Spirit – God , will come to the places where the recipient will be willing to receive the work, the Divine intervention, if you will. I have come to believe that the work might just not be where we in the Christian part of America would expect it to be. In church or a formal place. It might just be out away from there, in a place where a prophet needs to be fed and a widow is open to feed him/her. It might just be someone who is ill with something and just wants to get better.

Somehow this portion of Luke’s gospel gave me the courage to go – out – beyond – the routine and the normal places where a work of God might be expected. And when I went – I found God in some pretty interesting places. Among LGBT friends…lots of them. Among a poor young woman who was one of 9 kids who had all lived in multiple foster homes her entire life and was now trying to understand normal. Her faith was like a child. I found God’s life in the face of my Catholic friends, my Mormon friends, and my Buddhist friends. None of it made any sense in my life before Luke 4 came into the picture but it does now. God is no longer The Bible for me. God is now a great mystery, an ever-flowing stream of Spiritual life and Jesus, well… wow, Jesus is still all of that to me.

When I left my life in Nebraska behind me, I left my life as an Evangelical Christian behind me. I’ve written about it a lot and I’ve tried to be kind in doing so. Today it is on my mind again after reading an article by Frank Schaeffer, the son of a former Evangelical hero of mine, Francis Schaeffer. You can read it here if you so desire.  http://www.redletterchristians.org/open-letter-evangelical-establishment/

My journey into the faith of an Evangelical was one of discovering a love from God that I had never known before. It was one of discovering a people who were simple in their faith and who supported reading the Bible for one’s own self. I literally found a place where I felt at home. Over the years I attempted to “grow in Christ” as the dear people around me encouraged me to do. I attended Bible Studies, participated in Christian events of many kinds and even planned to make a career out of it. I really, truly believed that I had found the best possible way to live my life. I met my fantastic husband there and we set out to make our way in the faith together intending to go to somewhere overseas as missionaries.

Evangelical in its simplest terms means that one must choose to accept Jesus Christ as the one and only Son of God and the one and only way of salvation (from an eternal hell). One does this accepting by praying a prayer asking Christ to come into his/her heart. Once that prayer is prayed, eternity in heaven is obtained. You become one of those “in” the faith and everyone else who hasn’t prayed a similar prayer is one of those “out” of it. Simple, right? Well, not so much.

As time went on I began to discover that this Evangelical faith included varied forms, doctrinal beliefs, and multiple ways of expression. The one constant in all of my Evangelical experiences however, was this: CONFLICT. Constant conflict and continual in-fighting as person after person studied the Bible, interpreted it and created a church around it. Throughout all of my Evangelical life from 1977-2005, someone in whatever church I was going to was arguing about something with the goal to do the exact right thing for that particular church. Inevitably as soon as one decision was made, a group would pick themselves up and leave because they disagreed. New churches were started over and over and over. It was exhausting.

What led me out of the faith in the end though was not the conflict. I had somehow learned to endure that. The final straw was the church’s insistence upon rejecting good science, specifically the science of psychology. My daughter began to struggle with biologically based severe clinical depression as puberty started. In our carefully crafted Evangelical world everything had to have a spiritual root and her depression was no exception. Many people were kind and understanding but so very many were quick to judge her as a sinner in need of repentance, a spoiled child, and most disappointing of all as someone inhabited by a demon. We found no solace until a brilliant psychiatrist diagnosed her accurately and with great compassion. It was the end of our Evangelical journey and one I’m still coming to terms with because I still find my own faith in Christ real and personal and I have yet to find a way to express it in a way that Americans, especially those in the Midwest, understand. I’m very thankful that my Spiritual journey is no where near over.

“And that’s all I have to say about that.” Forrest Gump

maybe

My daughter has mental illness. Diagnosis in number too numerous to mention.

She was born a miracle with a less than a 1% chance at life. Everyone said, “God must have a special plan for her.” We thought so too. 

She grew up with a brain that had been subjected to early infant trauma that caused it to short circuit and reroute it’s neuro-pathways so everything was perceived as through a clouded glass window of trauma and then obstructed by the blackness of clinical depression.

My girl lived with a chronic fear of abandonment that added to the brain changing its normal route away from one of safety and security.  

I wish everyone could know, like her Dad and I know, how much she has really accomplished. Sometimes I have ached that she just wasn’t born with some glaring handicap so she could at least look like someone who has overcome so much. Instead, she looks like a healthy beautiful young woman…and thankfully now she’s very much living her best life. BUT we know the herculean effort it takes for her to live every single day. We know the hours of therapy she has engaged in to understand herself and to enact the changes she must enact to stay alive and independent. We know the bravery of every step she takes and we are in awe of her courage and relentless pursuit. 

Recently her prematurity came into the present when her bowel became obstructed from adhesions that basically have her entire intestinal tract glued to her abdominal wall. After a week in the hospital and a special diet, it resolved itself. The pain was severe. She made it through though and she went back to work caring for infants in a daycare. I am so proud of her. 

Sometimes life…

As winter is desperately trying to give way to spring here in central Minnesota I find that my life is also trying hard to give way to spring. In the middle of this very long winter, I found myself falling apart in a heap of tears at the oddest times and in the oddest places. Finally at Dean’s urging, I called a therapist and started to try to figure out what was going on. It’s no secret that I have had a rough few years with moving, a new job, a minor surgery that turned into a major nightmare and the inability to work for over two years. The term midlife crisis has come to have a whole new meaning to me.

I started meeting weekly with a therapist in January and it has proven to be a godsend to get me through this. After her evaluation  I was told that I was dealing with the realities of trauma and yesterday we discussed how seriously depressed I have been. Though I’m very familiar with mental illnesses from the other side of the fence, I’ve not been so familiar with them here on my own side.  As  I have been following through with the assignments given and become a further student of my own life, I have discovered that my recovery has simply been one of courage. As this poster came through on my Facebook page and I read it, I could hardly believe the way it mirrored the experiences I have had this past three and a half months. It’s from Marriage and Family Therapist Brene Brown

:

What began as asking for what I needed quickly evolved into figuring out just what my own truth actually is and being able to speak it clearly where I needed to. The next step was accepting what my story has been past and present; owning it, once that took place the very natural next step was to set new boundaries in my life in response to my truth and my story. And if that wasn’t enough, the final step up to this point has been to continue to reach out for support from those who understand my truth and my story. It’s been a very rewarding experience for me. Very, very difficult but definitely so very worthwhile.

Recently I discovered that many of my symptoms were either exacerbated by or the result of a deficiency of vitamins D and B12! As I’ve been downing the D and getting shots for the B12, I have been begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am certain that I’m really on my way to living a full life again and am seriously just so very grateful.

Getting past the reality of my 15 years in an Evangelical church culture that I let control my life hasn’t been easy. Finding the gems in the experience has taken me awhile but they are there. The year that my body completely broke down was also the year where I began to ask some very deep questions about my…self which for me, was a brave move. I started to read books from psychologists (Christian ones, of course) and I began to learn that I had so absorbed the literal Christian message of dying to my self and not having a will of my own that I lost…me.  Author Leanne Payne in her book Healing Presence gave me a perfect word picture for this time in my life. It is of a person bent down as they face another to the degree that they have no will of their own.  And from that place, I began to stand up but before I could stand, I had to understand my bentness and how I had landed in the broken place I was in.

I began to realize that in my heart there was a cavern of self doubt so large that all it took for me to surrender to someone else was their belief in me and their offering to me a way to success. In high school I felt incredibly lost. I had lived in the western part of the US until I was 12 and our family moved to northeast Nebraska where assimilating into the culture proved to be very difficult for me. I now realize that I’d lost my sense of place in the world. I have also come to understand that when you come from a lower income family with a father who is so driven to succeed, your life is constantly changing and on the move. We’d moved five times in four years and though it was quite an adventure at times, it was often confusing and chaotic for my internal world. This is a part of the American Dream that many don’t realize exists. My father finally found his professional calling and became very successful. He is a brilliant and resilient man. Married to my mom who is equally brilliant but in a very different way, the two of them figured it out and are now enjoying a wonderful retirement. They have blessed my life in many ways and I’m very grateful for that but their success set the achievement bar very high for my brother and me. In the years I grew up, sons went into the family business, girls found something else to do. I found Evangelical Christianity.

I was attracted to the new idea that Christ was a man who rose from the dead after having died on the cross for my sins. It took little or no effort at all to believe that I had sins enough to make my life unacceptable to God. The transaction of accepting Christ by saying a prayer that included admitting my sin and asking him into my heart with the promise that it would restore and direct my life made total sense to me just like it did for multitudes in the late 70’s. As my family’s life was absorbed in the business, mine was absorbed in this newly discovered faith using my natural leadership skills to become a disciple of Christ. A disciple was someone Jesus chose out of those who followed him and was therefore a very important person assigned to carry out his work on earth after his resurrection. To imagine that I could be one was very centering and empowering. I set my sights on becoming the absolute best one he ever had.

This commitment blessed my life in a million ways. It gave me a place in the world where Sunday after Sunday I could experience the love of sincere people who enjoyed my company. The pastor of the church became a safe harbor and much loved person in my life. His sons became my good friends. My way of having fun became a morally acceptable way without the pressure of alcohol, drugs and sex. In every way this little Baptist church was a shelter for me.

As a result of what I learned there and from the Bill Gothard ministry, I actually thought through what kind of person I wanted to marry. I actually wrote out a list of qualities I wanted in my husband at 16 and waited until I found one who fit the bill. After having just celebrated 30 years together, it seems to have been a good move. I suppose you could say that my list allowed me to enter dating and marriage consciously rather than as the result of an unplanned pregnancy. I was quite willing to become an Evangelical version of a nun if that would have been God’s will for me so I wasn’t in a huge hurry to settle for just for the sake of settling. When Dean came along, I literally checked off the things on my list.

Dean and I were both adventurous young adults and the life of an Evangelical Christian in the late 70’s was quite the thrill. With the goal of reaching THE WORLD for Christ, we learned so much about that world and its people. At present Dean and I love being in any environment (including Abbot Hospital in Minneapolis) that is full of diversity. We love interacting with those other than we are and the seeds of that love were planted in our lives as Evangelicals.

In the eighties we settled down and started our family in the middle of the church that split off from the Baptist church. It was our entire life. To this day our kids recall how we “lived” at the church. We experienced community in a way that very healthy and supportive. Our daughter was born three months early after my water broke at 13 weeks. To this day, I look back on that miraculous time as one where God spoke to me in my need and gave me faith to believe that she would live. The odds were less than 1%. Crazy and serendipitous events took place one right after the other and made it clear that this child was intent on being born with God’s help to get her here. Unfortunately, zealous Christianity, was not enough to ensure that her miraculous life would be an easy one. She has suffered much as a result of that traumatic experience. Her life brought with it deep questions, questions that would ultimately lead us away from this expression of our faith.

There is a lot more I could write about and of course, I am writing for my own self more than anything. As the realities surrounding Bill Gothard’s ministry hit home for me, it brought with it real clarity as to what the cornerstone of my personal faith’s dysfunction actually was, what things I chose to believe that set my life up for the physical breakdown I had experienced. Though I had let go of a lot of it and put it behind me for a long time, moving back into the Midwest and especially to a town where Evangelical Christianity is a mainstay has forced me to rethink it all over again. I still passionately believe in God but what that looks like from here on out is wide open. I only know that at 53 it is just fine to be me and to be who I am.

There is this thing about suffering that I’ve been mulling over in my head for some time now that I haven’t been able to put into form just yet.  I thought I’d spend some time blogging about it to see if it lands in a form that makes some sense to me. That thing is this: no matter what kind of suffering a person goes through, the person is always altered by it’s presence. It seems that any experience of pain coming into one’s life and hanging around awhile will change the life no matter what.

Suffering is pain. Pain that is often found in the form of…

• a physical sensation
• a mental stretching
• an emotional response
• spiritual confusion
• environmental stresses
• relationship tension

The pain comes in and the sufferer gets to respond. As the pain comes and the sufferer looks at it and avoids it, it usually gets more intense. That never works because pain is a force that demands to be acknowledged; to be seen, to be felt, to be heard, to be experienced. It doesn’t not want to be left out.

Pain seems to want to be about change. Change is it’s thing. Pain wanted me to notice the sliver in my finger that I didn’t feel go in when I carried some wood in the house. It wanted me to get it out because it was not a part of me.

Pain wanted me to notice that I was under-qualified for a teaching position even though the certificate said it wasn’t so.

Pain wanted me to learn to let go of control when my child had to face the dark by herself and let it change her.

Pain wanted me rest and refresh instead of push and push and push.

Pain pushes me to compare myself to others and determine that they are better than me and when that is more painful, then it pushes me to let go of comparison and just be me.

Pain makes me realize I need to draw boundaries in relationships.

It seems as if pain is very useful and that without it I wouldn’t be able to grow. I wouldn’t be able to mature. I wouldn’t be able to become.

Just some randomness on a Sunday night when my painful eyes are telling me it’s time for bed.

The ordeal of being true to your own inner way must stand high in the list of ordeals. It is like being in the power of someone you cannot reach, know, or move, but who never lets you go; who both insists that you accept yourself and who seems to know who you are.

It is awful to have to be yourself.

If you do reach this stage of life you are to some extent free from your fellows. But the travail of it. Precious beyond valuing as the individual is, his fate is feared and avoided. Many do have to endure a minute degree of uniqueness, just enough to make them slightly immune from the infection of the crowd, but natural people avoid it. They obey for comfort’s sake the instinct warns, “Say yes, don’t differ, it’s not safe”. It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but we do know it is our sacred duty.

One of many gems from Florida Scott-Matthews The Measure of My Days  published when she was 85 years old.

     Dean started working in Minnesota in February of 2010, I joined him in May for the summer and returned to student teach and finish getting my endorsement in Mild/Moderate Special Education that fall. I left Utah in the rear view mirror and though I expected to miss it, I didn’t expect that it would be anywhere near as much as it has been. As time has gone on, I have sensed the fatigue of friends and family as I vocalize my discontent of my situation. Though I sympathize with that weariness, I find that one of the gems I learned while living in Logan was that I am a passionate person who feels things deeply and for me to be okay, I need to give myself permission to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling. Not feeling is simply not an option for me. In fact, not feeling and not being honest in my expression of those feelings when appropriate, is to move backward and into a life of pretense where just about everyone in my life is happy with my life’s situation, BUT ME.  Katy Perry gets me very well…

“I used to bite my tongue and hold my breath
Scared to rock the boat and make a mess
So I sat quietly, agreed politely…

     Though I know I wasn’t exactly known for being quiet, I was terrified to be honest and go for what I really wanted. I know that not being in love with my life in Minnesota to the same degree that I loved living Utah, especially after 3 long years, makes some in my life very uncomfortable. I feel the pressure to get past it, to buck up and endure, to see that because I have a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood etc., and that I have a husband who loves me, anything but utter awe and gratitude is unacceptable. In a nutshell I feel as if I am quite possibly seen as just one ungrateful bitch. But you see, for me, the reality is that I’ve done that before. I have silenced my own voice because what it had to say did not please the powerful in my life and real honestly, not pleasing the powerful was terrifying. So, from 1983-2005, I pleased others; Christians whom I saw more spiritual than me, my parents, my husband’s parents and others. I was last in a very long line.  I accepted my life in a place where I never really did want to live but felt very obligated to live. There were many things about MY LIFE that I did like, many PEOPLE in my life that I loved but it was never really a good fit. That’s just the honest truth – it is my truth. 

Fast forward to the present, as I consider what I have been through since I’ve lived in Minnesota…

• My first SPED job was overwhelming, confusing and exhausting. I never did really master it and that is a horribly difficult reality to accept that I had to leave it before I did. 
• I had my appendix out followed by a relatively minor surgery that resulted in complications that nearly ended my life and resulted in 2 more (emergency) surgeries followed by the removal of my gall bladder, followed by chronic pain which remains with me to some degree at at all times. 
• Life in a culture that is very different from all I have known. 
• Isolation from not being able to work and Minnesota’s brutal winters. 

It’s just not at all easy to say, “I love it there”. So, here’s the deal. I am sorry if my whining makes you feel uncomfortable but I don’t apologize for honestly telling you the truth when you ask how I like it in Minnesota. I’d move back to Utah in a heartbeat but I am giving it my best shot every single day. 

Jesus said that it would be THE TRUTH that would set us free and I tend to agree. Living in light of my truth, even the difficult truths, is much more peaceful than it ever was living with pretense and I simply will not return to that. 

When Dean and I got married in 1983 we were really just great friends who could only imagine our future as one shared with the other. We met in college and were both being trained as teachers but both determined to go to Africa as missionaries. Our marriage was one centered in our Evangelical Christian faith so there were rules we felt we needed to follow if we were to have a great marriage like we wanted. Sex was saved for marriage and we even went so far as not to even kiss each other until we were “officially” engaged. Yes, that was us, with all our moral ducks in a neat little row.

We got married by a Southern Baptist preacher in a large church that we actually had to rent because my church wouldn’t hold the almost 400 people gathered together to witness the event.  It was an interesting time in that we brought together some feuding Christians who loved us but weren’t so fond of each other. We had no idea that our inclusive nature would be one of the best things about our future life together. We had no idea it would also be one of the most difficult things about our life together as well. Dean and I loved God and we loved people. We were idealists bent on changing the world and making it a better place and at that time in our lives we thought that it would be best to do that in Uganda with a ministry we were involved in at the University of Nebraska. We married fully expecting to be on their staff in a couple of years. Then life happened.

Students loans, babies and not taking jobs in our chosen professions, made our journey overseas an impossible one. As we lived with the disappointment reality brought our way, one thing that remained constant was our shared struggle. We were married to each other on purpose because in each other we found a partner we wanted to journey through life with. Some of it was magical and romantic but for the most part it was a lot of hard work. Disagreements came and went but for the two of us, marriage was a deep commitment we had made to each other and we agreed that we would hang in there until we reached a consensus and were in full agreement with each other before moving forward. We honestly thought this was what all marriages were like.

After being in this thing for over 30 years, we have learned a great deal about ourselves and each other. We have come to understand that not all marriages are like our own. We know very well that there are marriages where the law stills says two people are married but in reality those two people couldn’t be more separate from each other. We’ve realized that there are times when divorce is not only necessary, it can be vital to the sanity and safety of those involved. Clearly not everyone is fortunate enough to find a partner who is steady and unwavering in commitment to them like Dean and I are to each other. It is a heart-breaking reality of life and now I understand that better than ever.

This last three years have been the most difficult of any we have ever faced as a couple. The main reason this is so is because I moved here with great reluctance and only after a great deal of what I will call heart-wrestling. I agreed to it in the end because I realized that the job Dean was being offered here was the absolute best fit for him. I knew that were he to find something in Utah, where we were living at the time, his gifts and talents would never be able to be used to their full potential in comparison to how they would be with this job. I can honestly say that supporting him this past three years has been the most difficult thing i have ever done and continue to do. As the heart-wrestling continues however, we are coming into a new season of understanding and I think we can continue to make it work here in Cambridge, Minnesota. The verdict is out there yet but for today it is working.

I share this slice of our life with you, because as I consider how the cultural images and practices involving marriage have drastically changed in my lifetime, I think that what remains clear to me more now than ever before, is that at the heart of a good and genuine marriage, there is not only the ability to love and be loved, but there is the ability to hang in there as you both commit to doing whatever it takes to continue together. You wrestle with the shared sacrifices that it will constantly take to make your marriage a positive union.

As we see reality TV continually tell our young people to, “say yes to the dress” or to “go to Jerrod’s”,I think for humanity’s sake,  it would be a much better investment of our dollars to encourage single people to forget about those things all together and invest in long walks, talks over coffee or whatever it takes to really get to know that other person until you leave them behind or determine that you want to commit to continuing with them for the long haul.

Marriage is commitment and hard work. The end.

A few months ago I started to notice that many of my Christian friends were posting comments about this guy named Phil Robertson. I think the first one said something to the effect of “Phil Robertson for President” I mistakenly thought it said Pat Robertson. I had no idea who this Phil Robertson even was.  More posts came and went about him and Duck Dynasty so I Googled the show and discovered just where the two intersected.

My curiosity was aroused as to why the people I knew were continually expressing positive things about the show when they themselves were not necessarily known to be duck hunters. Then one day as I was looking for something to watch on television I came across an actual Duck Dynasty show and thought I’d satisfy my curiosity and watch an episode. It was one where the entire tribe of duck hunters and their families were going on a trip to Hawaii. Clearly scripted for the greatest possible impression of a redneck vacation, they got ready to go, flew to their destination and proceeded to vacate. It was clear to me that the show was meant to be goofy and entertaining, kind of a joke, if you will.  I get that. What I was still questioning is why these guys were so popular. Then something new came into view.

The Robertsons began to show up in other places. They were guests on Christian talk shows and articles were done in magazines where they talked about their faith and how they had found the right way to deal with sex through abstinence before marriage and as we have all heard in the last few days, Phil is clearly against homosexuality. What happened next was somewhat of a surprise to me as he was seen as a hero once again for “standing up for his beliefs” and “telling it like it is”.

Here is what he said.

“It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical…Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.”

When did speaking up like this become a desirable way to stand up for one’s beliefs. First of all as a woman, the thought of someone reducing my sexuality down to just how desirable my vagina is to the opposite sex is a pretty disgusting way to talk about something that especially as a Christian, I believe is private and personal. To reduce sexuality to vaginas and anuses is also absolutely disgusting. If you understand sexuality in what I believe to be a healthy way, it is seen as the natural flow of an intimate relationship and only part of the whole of that relationship. How on earth did we as Christians learn to get almost giddy when a rich, celebrity, duck hunter talks about sex like this? Really, truly, do YOU talk like this? Did JESUS talk like this in the gospels?

What I see in Mr. Robertson’s comments have A LOT more to do with Mr. Robertson than they do with hetero vs. homosexual behavior. When I watched the episode with them going to Hawaii, I was astonished at how crude and rude they are in how they talked to each other. I realized very quickly that the dialog was clearly scripted and sensationalized by A&E because they want the family to appear as redneck and hick-like as possible. When I looked up Mr. Robertson on Wikipedia today I discovered that he’s a lot smarter than you would guess after watching the show. He has a Master’s Degree in Education and is a brilliant businessman.

I am really saddened that this is what Christian thinking has become in our culture. In terms of a response to LGBT individuals I think this example:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shane-l-windmeyer/dan-cathy-chick-fil-a_b_2564379.html

might prove to be better in terms of what Jesus would do.

As we were playing games on Thanksgiving my daughter said something that struck such a chord in my heart and I can’t quit thinking about it. She simply said with a note of sarcasm, “…and that’s when you became a Christian and didn’t do anything wrong anymore.” We had been discussing the alcohol I was drinking and her surprise that I would drink something with whiskey in it. It was my only drink of the evening and I was enjoying it as we sat there. She knew that I didn’t drink in high school or college because I was a passionate Christian.

As my daughter’s words continue to make their presence known in my head, I find that it is with a fair amount of mourning that I process them.  Her words reflect the truth of what I thought as a teen and then as a mother in my twenties. I honestly thought that making a one time transaction with God by “accepting Christ into my heart” gave me the power not to do wrong things anymore and therefore, I was set on a new course that meant that all of my future life was about becoming a morally perfect person, and as a mother that meant raising morally perfect children. Not only did the requirements of moral perfection become burdensome to my children, they soon broke my life up in pieces and it was in my brokenness that faith beyond rules and regulations was born in my heart. It is with sadness that I grasp that my children saw me then and may see me now as that anxious rule keeper instead of their mother who has experienced a very deep and loving relationship with God as an apprentice to Jesus.

As I look back on those years I see that I had always talked about the grace of God as sufficient for me when I screwed up but rather than relaxing in that grace and full acceptance, I anxiously lived my life as though I’d only be given a certain number of free passes with sin and then God would cut me off the vine or kick me out of the family. I adopted this worldview because it was the way Christianity was lived out in my midst day after day.  I witnessed the stumbling and falling of others and my faith community’s response to those moral failures multiple times and it honestly frightened me to the core. Rather than being a place of reality where we all share in our humanity as well as our spirituality, where forgiveness is freely given and love is the driving force behind that forgiveness, I witnessed something very different. Dear friends were publicly shamed, hurt even more and eventually cast out of the community. It was overwhelmingly painful and the reality is that my kids saw and experienced it all as well and the end result is that Christianity and church has been crushed in the crux of their real lives.

I remain a Christian today because I love the person of Jesus I see in the gospels. I don’t always see Paul’s writings measure up to the real actions of Jesus so that has made me question many things about my belief that the Bible was inerrant and literal from cover to cover. I no longer believe that it is. I’m a Christian because I continue to believe that grace bears up under the greatest of suffering and that from its bearing, deep truths from the heart of God are born in my life and in the world.  I love my children and respect their pain even if I cannot take it away. I have turned my course as their mother and continue to hope they have lives full of purpose and meaning. And, yes, I drink whiskey and sprite on occasion.

In a recent Facebook dialogue I was forced to face my past once again. I wish that I could do like the experts tell me. You know what they say about the past right?

Forget it.  All that matters IS the present. IT is all you really have. THIS moment, that is it. Be what you want to be right now. Forget about what went before. It is over, it is finished. You are not your past.

I can’t begin to count the number of times I have heard that. It is so many that I want to scream, I can’t get OVER it, I just can NOT because I have a super sensitive soul and one that feels my life so deeply that the past is super hard for me to just let go of.  But I don’t scream and I don’t throw things, I simply endeavor to work through them. As one who’s built my life around working with others, I have observed that the past doesn’t easily just go away for most people even when they purposely build their lives in a completely different direction.

When a soldier comes home from the battlefield and cannot just instantly forget the past and move on, it is because what took place when they were at war was very intense and traumatic for them and trauma literally changes the way a body responds to life from then on out.  This soldier will never be able to not know what it is like to have fought in a war and seen such horror, every single moment of every single day.

Consider the physical trauma Brett Favre endured while having spent his career playing in the NFL. He recently said that he could not remember going to his daughter’s soccer games this past summer as a result the severe concusions he has endured throughout his career. Mr. Favre’s physically traumatic past will steal his present from now on, every single moment of every single day.

Elizabeth Smart was severely traumatized during her time with her captor and his wife in the Wasatch mountains and in California. Having only known the life of an upper class, Temple recommended Mormon, the intensity of what she went through was extreme and intensely traumatizing. She will move on but will live with this every single moment of every single day.

The past matters. Though we can learn to live with it and create a new life for ourselves, it will always remain there with us. It think that forgetting it and moving on has a great deal to do with how intensely personal and traumatizing it was for YOU. My experiences aren’t nearly as traumatizing with continual concussions, going to war or being kidnapped and abused for 9 months but in many ways it was equally intense for ME. And in the same way that these three people will never fully leave their past behind them, I will not easily leave it behind me, especially where the concept of an organized church is concerned.

Recently someone shared these words with me and it occurred to me than many of you may feel the exact same way.

You seem to think you and your family are the only ones who got dealt some tough blows, and having to go through them gives you this exclusive understanding about spiritual things, and the church. If anything, I think it has jaded you in some ways toward the church.

I am writing this blog out today because I realized this morning that I simply need an opportunity to have a conversation with you, my friends of faith who have known me as a committed, passionate, Evangelical Christian and have observed that I am indeed jaded toward “the church”.  If Dictionary.com is correct, then these words are absolutely accurate in describing where I am it with reference to “the church”. It says that jaded means:1. dulled or satiated by overindulgence: a jaded appetite. 2.worn out or wearied, as by overwork or overuse.

I love it that the first definition means “dulled or satiated by overindulgence” because I simply ate too much of it. The second one, “worn out or wearied, as by overwork or overuse” fits equally well. I am writing this because my blows as this person put it, have jaded me. I’m totally spent where the institution of church is concerned and honestly have no desire to return to it. We visited a church here where I hoped we could feel at home and though I loved the people, I just couldn’t imagine doing it again. It had taken us 5 years of experiences with our church in Logan before we became members and I would go back there in a heartbeat because I highly trust the people I know there. The church here is a different denomination and everything is brand new to us, I just don’t seem to have the emotional energy to learn it all and develop relationships of the trust that I personally need to feel safe there. I’m jaded. I know that.

I also have to say that as intense as my church involvement was the 5 years and 6 weeks that I first taught in the Christian School were paradoxically some of the best of my life – the time in the classroom was a great joy to me. I loved it. BUT my experiences were as traumatic for me as any of the examples I have given here. So much was expected of me as an emerging leader in the church at large even with the full knowledge that I had two toddlers of my own at home. I know full well that I chose to do what I did but so did Brett Favre and any soldier who enlists in the military. We are never, ever prepared for trauma.  I also know that I was very young and simply not mature enough to control my own life. I know that I had issues from my own past that led me to over commit and neglect my own body to the point that I was 30 lbs. underweight and desperately sick to the point that I almost died. The impact of this trauma on my children has been severe too. Hannah’s eating disorder had a lot to do with these years. All of it is interwoven within and part of the trauma that hit our family when Hannah was born 3 months early and had multiple health problems while we were in the midst of all of this overcommitment.  Separating things out has not been, nor will it ever be easy but I am and we are trying.

As for whether or not I have any “exclusive understanding about spiritual things” well, I suppose I do think I might have some unique observations and insights from working through my past with therapists and friends who have given me the space to never go to church again if its not in my best interest.  I also found God profoundly more real than ever in my own LIFE when I lived in the Cache Valley in northern Utah. In the 5 years of exposure to First Pres. in Logan I discovered what it was like to be a woman in a church where there are pretty much no male or female roles in the leadership unless you happen to be a male or female actually in that role. That was a profoundly healing experience for me personally. In Utah I also got to know many Mormons and discovered the face of Christ very present in their lives. That experience made me ask some really hard questions about all things Christian. My massage therapist in Logan is a beautiful lesbian Buddhist woman and I learned more from her about the deep love of God and being present in the moment than I ever had before. As one with a passion for the spiritual life and one rooted in Christianity, I’m constantly seeking and learning and I realize that many of you will not like the answers I determine to be true for myself. The only reason we even have a relationship is that somehow in the midst of all the confusion and pain we forged a friendship of sorts that continues and that is very meaningful to me still. It does not mean, however, that I think I’m all that right about a whole lot of things. In fact there are only a very few things in my life now that I am certain of and most have little to do with the church. The reality is that heavy involvement and leadership in my particular Evangelical Church those 5 years and 6 weeks prior to leaving for health reasons has jaded me. It just is that simple.  It is is my past and it will be with me every single moment of every single day no matter how much I try to be present and let it go.

First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God! — Lady Julian of Norwich

I have fallen. I am climbing up from the fall but it is a much more difficult climb than I expected. Every day I am forced to live in the present moment because thinking beyond the moment is often overwhelming.  I think often about how I used to remind myself that Jesus said not to worry about tomorrow because tomorrow will take care of itself. I thought I understood this a long time ago. Then I fell. Hard. Hard enough that I thought I might not get up again. The kind of fall that many tell me didn’t kill me so will surely make me stronger. I just smile when I hear these words because I don’t have the energy to say what I really think.

The kind of fall Rohr speaks of is one that happens to spiritual seekers in midlife after we think we have arranged our life to look and be just like we want it. I don’t know if his truths are universal, I do know that they came to me as I was falling and have become a manual for being alive right now.  I want to blog about the journey up from the fall so I’ll be writing bits and pieces as I go.

I have made a couple of posts recently with references to my time as an Evangelical Conservative Christian. It has been on my heart for a very long time to share about my journey away from that definition of the Christian faith. Having been a very active person committed to leadership as an Evangelical, Born Again, Conservative, Christian from 16 on, it is how many of you know me. I am certain that my thoughts on various topics and my observations about them having now lived 36 more years on the earth, have come as a surprise to some of you. You might not want to hurt me so you stay in the loop of the Facebook Friends circle. Or you may genuinely appreciate the thought that goes into my posts and if nothing else, think them through. It is out of a deep respect for you that in my continual quest to become more authentic and real, I am going to attempt to express where I’m at in this journey of faith.

I came to Evangelical Christianity in 1977 at a time in my life when I was eager to find a way to make the choices I wanted to make in my life. I was very anxious to change the course of my life. In addition, I sincerely felt the Spirit of God drawing me into a spiritual way of life.  Living in Northeast Nebraska, there is a really good chance that if you want a spiritual life, your search will take you toward Evangelical Christianity and it was especially true in the late 70’s. I went to an interdenominational youth group (that was led Southern Baptists) where a small booklet was shared that emphasized the following 4 points.

1)God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life

2)Man is sinful and separated from God. Therefore, he cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for his life.

3)Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. Through Him you can know and experience God’s love and plan for your life.

4)We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.

Upon explaining the 4th point, the reader gives the hearers an opportunity to pray the following prayer:

Lord Jesus, I need You. Thank You for dying on the cross for my sins. I open the door of my life and receive You as my Savior and Lord. Thank You for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. Take control of the throne of my life. Make me the kind of person You want me to be.

I prayed that prayer and fully embraced this experience as my own north star.

Shortly after this happened I was invited to participate in a Bible Study where I quickly learned the error of my parent’s ways in bringing me up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. I was taught that it was wrong because it did not include the four points described above, but instead relied on infant baptism for entrance into heaven after death. I was instructed to believe that the Bible was also the inerrant and literal word of God which we as Lutherans did not believe in the same way.  As a young zealous and suddenly purpose-filled believer, I very quickly became  right and everyone else in my life who didn’t believe this way became wrong.  My life began to be lived with the continual emphasis on learning the ins and outs of this one right way. Part of the package for me was that it was also my mission to seek to convince others that it was in fact the right way. I was fully convinced it was the way I should go. This faith worked very well for me for a very long time.

As most of you know when Hannah was diagnosed with an eating disorder and almost died, literally within hours both times. Dean and I began to question every single thing we had ever been taught up to that point. Standing at death’s door and finding your neatly packaged faith under the intense scrutiny of your reality, changes you. It changed me and I have no choice but to live with those changes.

My parents taught me early on to observe things around me, to analyze those things and change my course if I needed to do so. This way of life was reinforced when I went into education, while I was teaching children and as I lived my life with my husband and two kids. Unfortunately, much of what I experienced in the Evangelical world did not involve this active thinking model. My experience was that my role in the faith was primarily to be a passive learner by listening and then doing what I was told to do. I was to learn that most of the thinking there would be done by others more spiritual than myself. I found myself butting heads with authority over and over and in this environment, as a thinking person, and definitely as a woman, that was often very difficult.

It would be impossible to explain the many observations, analysis processes and changes that have resulted in my life over the years but to this day I am thankful for every single one. Had I remained a passive learner, Hannah would have died at 16 and i don’t think Stephen would have made it through jr high and high school. In my search for their best interests, I was opposed most strongly by many of those in my faith community who determined they knew better based on some version of a biblical formula that I apparently did not understand correctly.  In the midst of these experiences and while i was teaching in a Christian school, I began to simply shut down to others, especially those in the faith. While my internal flame seemed to burn brighter, and God was ever present in my struggle, people with all of the answers became very difficult to interact with.  I don’t mind a spirited debate based on mutual respect but when someone is determined that I embrace their one right way and have no tolerance for my perspective, it’s just easier to not engage with them at all.  Unfortunately, I’m equally certain there are those of you who will read this, with the same experience only with me as the one who thinks she has it all together. I am sorry if that it is your experience with me.

Oddly enough God saw fit to lead me out to Utah into the heart of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  In the Mormon culture I could hide away because there were no Evangelicals in my immediate circle.  Having to dig that deep into the basis of my existence was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.  My life focus was to love God with all of my heart, mind and strength and to love my neighbor as myself. Those 7 years profoundly changed my life.

At present, I continue to be a very spiritual and I believe, God directed person but I know full well that I probably don’t know very much when it comes to all there is to know in this vast world and beyond. I do not believe the Bible to be without human influence or without error. I am still so fascinated with Jesus Christ and do my best to pattern my life after his.  AND, I continue to do as my parents taught me, observe, analyze and make changes.  I would add that I find great relief in writing my thoughts out for others to consider. I love to get into good, rich discussions where passionate hearts can bring out every side of an argument and in the end find common ground. I don’t see that as weakness, but strength in the human process.  It is always my intent to provide some mental sandpaper for the culture we live in when I write.  As any parent with a loved one battling and eating or body image disorder, the culture needs the sanding. Most of all, it is my life’s mission to know that I am simply honest and real,

I respect each person’s journey and though I may address a former way of thinking as an Evangelical, it is not meant to hurt anyone in particular, it is simply my own frame of reference.

Namaste

Kelly Clarkson has been singing her heart out saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, stand a little taller, doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone. What doesn’t kill you makes a fighter, footsteps even lighter”… you get the idea. In her song Kelly is referring to a break up with a guy not killing her but making her stronger.  The actual concept comes from a deep thinking philosopher who endured a mental break down at 34 from which he never recovered. He died at 56 having lived 23 years with continual mental and physical health problems. His own life seemed to prove that what doesn’t kill you can actually make you crazy. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche.

I originally saw this quote in the early 90’s on a magazine cover in the grocery store. Sally Field was using it to describe a personal battle she’d been through and I needed to hear it. A few months prior to that I had been given a very bleak diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus, forced  to leave a job I absolutely loved and spend the rest of my days trying to figure out how to live with chronic illness. I found great inspiration for an optimistic outcome in the thought that lupus would likely not kill me but instead make me stronger.

In many, many ways living with an underlying auto immune disease (doctors have changed my diagnosis several times) has actually made me stronger. Long bouts of silence and solitude have forced me to read and think deeply about my life in ways that would never have been possible otherwise. In other ways, though, the great crash in 1992 that almost killed me has also made it more difficult than I could ever have imagined it would.

My illness was diagnosed when my daughter was just 5 years old.  Though it brought me home full time, I was often in bed and absent from her daily life for long periods of time. At 16 and in therapy for a life threatening eating disorder, she revealed to us that she had no memory of my illness and its consequences to our family. She had totally dissociated from the experience because it was so traumatic for her. With much effort and contemplation on her part, she finally did remember it and along with it the intense fear that I was going to die. That fear combined with a rough bonding experience and trauma from abdominal surgeries as a premature baby, made life in adolescence unbearable for her.  Her brain was literally injured through those experiences.  As a result, the last 12 years of my daughter’s life have been filled with doctors appointments, insurance appeals, time in treatment and more “advice” than any of us could possibly tolerate.  She is 26 and doing her best to make a valuable and meaningful life for herself.  She is amazingly resilient and strong but mental illness and the medical issues from her premature birth have nearly killed her several times. Her life will only be lived well WITH mental illness. There is no cure.

Two years ago this coming October, I went to the hospital for a minor surgery in the midst of beginning a new career as a Special Education teacher working with kids with emotional/behavior disorders. At the time I was in a new home, a new state and had no support system in place. The work I was doing very quickly became the most stress-filled position I had ever had. In this new land up north I went to school in the dark and went home in the dark. My room had no natural light in it. Having lived in Utah where there are 300+ days with sunshine at 4500 feet in elevation, it was a huge shock to my system.

In addition to my own issues, my daughter chose to suddenly leave and move 1500 miles away. After all we’d been through together, I had become very fixed on keeping her alive and well. In other words, codependent and the distance terrified me. I had nightmares of her dying on a regular basis. It was as if the multiple traumas from having almost lost her in infancy, from the eating disorder and all that went with mental illness, had reached its max in my body.  I had grown so used to living on the ragged edge that I didn’t grasp how vulnerable I was.  I had started having panic attacks the week before my surgery was scheduled. I really should have cancelled it and waited until the following summer. Unfortunately, I was sleeping almost upright because the reflux was so intense that I was beginning to get it into my wind pipe when I was flat on the bed and one can actually die from that so I thought I just had to do it.

Two more surgeries followed after major complications arose and in January my gall bladder had to be removed.  This nightmare left my body extremely spent and vulnerable. One of the surgeries involved cutting a rib in two, spreading my ribs apart with a special instrument and cutting an intercostal nerve in two while injuring several others.  As my body attempted to heal, new problems continually developed making it impossible for me to continue to teach Special Ed here in Minnesota. In fact, it’s made it impossible for me to do very much at all beyond taking care of myself and my home. I am beginning to get physically stronger but clearly, if I don’t learn how to read my body’s stress responses, I will not live a lot longer.

I’ve learned so much through the illnesses and losses in my life that I can definitely say, I am in fact stronger in every way. At the same time, there are elements of my life that have become a whole lot weaker and taken from one angle could definitely prove Nietzsche wrong. I think that it could just as easily be said, “That which does not kill you has the potential to turn you into a wretched, sour and fatalistic human being.”

The truth is that all of these things together made me severely depressed and at times I really didn’t have any idea how to carry on. The only things that kept me alive were my faith in a God who loved me so ruthlessly that I could be completely real and not feel ashamed and the need to be here for my family.

Though my body still has a ways to go, I have been doing a lot better this entire summer. It is clear to me now that the rest of my life is truly up to me and the decisions I make. It has become very clear to me that working for anyone else is something I will never do again. My body is structurally compromised as a result of the thoracotomy surgery and though I am improving every day, the muscle rebuilding process continues to be long and slow. My adrenal glands have worked over time for way too long so the stress hormones in my body are very low.  I can’t endure a lot of loud music and find myself quickly over stimulated in public places. This last weekend I stretched myself and took a trip with Dean to northern Utah to celebrate our 30th anniversary. We did a lot of things but in-between we hiked in the solitude and quiet of the mountains. I made it through the airport and did fine among a lot of people, so I know I am getting better every day.

I can sing with Kelly Clarkson’s song and align with Nietzsche’s thoughts believing that what hasn’t killed me is making me stronger but here’s the real deal;  it is simply time for me to stop trying to prove it.

On 9/3/13 we celebrate 30 years of being Mr. & Mrs. Wedekind. After chatting with my mom yesterday and telling her that I was going to be visiting them at the end of next week she said, “It’s nice that Dean “allows” you to do that.” I realized at that moment why we have the marriage we do and why we’re going stronger than ever as “married” at the 30 year mark. Dean doesn’t “allow” me to do anything.  I don’t “allow” him to do anything either. We are in each other’s lives all of the time but the only thing we “allow” each other to do is just be who we are.  That has worked pretty well because the “are” that I am, fits the “are” that he is very well. I tried to explain to my mom that Dean’s just grateful I’m not working so I can see them (and his parents) more often.  It’s been this way for 30 years and that’s got me thinking about why that is.

One thing that’s been SO difficult for me as we embark on year 31, is that I’m such a feminist that the role of the traditional middle aged woman being at home and living off of her husband just sort of makes me want to hit something but in reality, I know it’s not like that for either of us.  That’s probably why when Mom said Dean “allowed” me to do that, it just sounded so odd. We have been in this thing together all the way from the beginning. Our marriage has never been an adventure in keeping score or balancing the scales. It’s just been both of us fully invested as two whole and equal people treating each other as we would want to be treated. We have certainly had plenty of those moments when we both wondered what on earth were we thinking in getting married to each other…and wondering if there could possibly be ANYONE who was any more different than the other. We fought as most couples do but we learned to do it well and do it until we resolved the issue.

It’s definitely been a very REAL 30 years. The last 3 1/2  have kicked our butts with my return to school full time, the move, the jobs, a minor surgery turning into a major ordeal and just doing life together. Things are leveling out again though and it’s finally home here. I’ve got the Vikings game on while I’m writing this because that’s just what I do now. We’ll be celebrating our big day a little early with 3 days in Logan…mostly just looking at “our”  mountains, walking “our” trails,  eating great food and being with some priceless friends. I’m feeling very blessed as I reminisce.

As news outlets and social media have been processing the verdict handed down to George Zimmerman, I’m sorely tempted to keep my voice quiet because, well, speaking out always gets feedback and my skin is relatively thin. I can’t be silent about this because it matters so much to me.  It matters because not only are these tensions very real between blacks and whites in America, they are equally present between, Conservatives and Liberals, Evangelical and Liberal Christians, Heterosexuals and homosexuals, bikers and non-bikers, old and young…clearly I could go on.

It seems really clear to me that in general, we each like OUR OWN people best and of course that makes sense. We’re born into the world where we are and it shapes who we become. We live in a world that is much larger and more complex than we really know how to handle very well. Crossing into another’s culture or thought paradigm in not as easy and we might at first think it is. Maybe we need to first and foremost give each other a little more empathy along the way so we’re not just yelling and screaming and can really find some answers that make sense.  It is grueling, tedious and hard work to try to see another from a worldview other than one’s own as I discovered moving from a place I’d lived in for most of my life.

The first move in 2005 (I was 44) took us into the heart of Mormon country, Utah. The community we chose to live in was 85% Latter Day Saint. My husband and I experienced first hand what it was like to be a minority and discovered very quickly that it is simply just difficult when two cultures collide.  It took a fair amount of conscious effort on our part to understand and accept our differences but we had a wonderful life there.

Our second move came five years later when we came to a small conservative town just on the edge of the Twin Cities in Minnesota.  We did not expect a cultural collision because we are from Nebraska and the Midwest IS the Midwest, right? Well…not so much. There are similarities but oh.my.goodness. there are differences. It’s been three years and we are still trying to navigate the ins and outs of culture here.  It has taken no small effort and is still something I can’t quite master to the point of loving it here. I find myself forming stereotypes and opinions of the “others” just to cope with how different it is for me.

In light of my own experiences, I think of the Zimmerman/Martin situation in Florida and the fear on both sides based on years of social conditioning.  We all know that when a  young person wears his hood up in warm weather  (Living up north you discover that even warm and cold are relative concepts!) we feel a bit frightened. We’ve been conditioned to mistrust that one thing and expect that those doing it are “hoodlums” up to no good and everyone would agree that its worse at night. Some of this is purely human and we find that hard to admit. Being on one side or the other is much more soothing.

I will never carry a gun because I don’t ever want to deal with the mental anguish of having killed someone else. I can’t even imagine living in a neighborhood where I feel as if I have to hide from my neighbors or have someone on watch to keep it safe. I would imagine that there is a lot of tension in the air all of the time when that is the culture one lives in.  I hate it that a young black unarmed male was shot and I hate it that a man would feel so afraid that he’d have to carry a gun to feel safe and be on watch in the first place.  At the end of the day what will change this scenario seems to me to be our intent.

We have to figure out how to be less afraid of the “other” – and that includes Democrats and Republicans. We must intend to at least try to understand the reasons why the others are as they are instead of prejudging them based on who we are.  In this one situation, it is very easy to see it from a narrow, white, Midwest point of view for me, but thankfully many mentors have taught me over the years that there is a lot more to this than that. A lot more.

Today I realized that an area of shame in my life was clarified and removed from my life through my daughter’s recent surgery. In 2004 she was incorrectly diagnosed as having an ovarian cyst. It was just one of the many things we were dealing with at the time because she was also dealing with major depression and an eating disorder. We’d already spent $60,000 trying to get her the help she needed in an inpatient facility miles away from our home. It was all so stressful and I was extremely raw. I was usually just doing the next thing and trying to keep my head above water.  During this time many well-meaning friends were trying to offer advice and care for us and one of those friends was strongly encouraging me to take my daughter to a prayer ministry in Georgia. She bought a book from the ministry for me to use to “help” my daughter by recognizing the Biblical dysfunctions going on in our family etc. I brought the book home and looked into it.

The book’s author insisted that every illness we face has a spiritual root. It listed many illnesses and one of those happened to be an ovarian cyst. As I read the page that addressed this issue it said something about how it was the result of a bad relationship with the mother. I could hardly believe it.  It wasn’t enough that our local psychologist kept telling me that it was my emotional responses that were causing Hannah to make the choice to purge, suddenly it was the BIBLE telling me that I caused this ovarian cyst! Honestly, it was so painful that I nervously took the book back over to my friend and wrote her a letter expressing myself. I believe I did that very poorly but I was crushed.

Fast forward to June 24 when I hear the ob/gyn tell me that when she and the other surgeon actually made their way into my daughter’s pelvis, they discovered a massive amount of fluid encased in adhesions and therefore unable to dissipate through the normal tissues, in addition to that they discovered that her fallopian tube was actually twisted in a tendon and it too had been encased in adhesions. The adhesions were from a series of life-saving surgeries that began in her life when she weighed just 3 lbs! Her pain and her dysfunction had nothing to do with EITHER of us! I had no idea I still carried the suspicion that this author might have been correct and I’d just blown it with my daughter.  I had no idea that buried down deep in my heart was this cavern of shame connected to her pain much of it coming directly from this man’s material. My rational mind told me long ago that I did not cause this but my heart had absorbed another interpretation of the event.

When someone is ill we want so desperately to fix them and I completely understand that my friend’s intentions were just that. But in order for this “teacher” to come to the conclusions he did, he had engaged A LOT of speculation about what the Bible means. I have come so far in my thoughts about the Bible and now wouldn’t even open the cover on a book like this author’s…well, I hope I wouldn’t. I’m finally free of this because it is clearly…ever so clearly that a life-saving surgery left behind adhesions and as my daughter grew they left their mark on her fragile body. She is so strong and resilient. She pursued doctors and help for this as an adult and found it. Thank God I had never shared this information with her.

I only hope that I can learn from this and be a lot more careful about the friendly advice I share with others.

The Real Identity Theft
from Stephen Covey’s book The 3rd Alternative

“We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people’s definition of you. You get so immersed in external agendas, the cultural story, the political and social pressures, that you lose the sense of who you are and what you could do in life. I call this the ‘real identity’ theft.’ This identity theft is very real and going on all of the time simply because people do not distinguish between their own mind and the mind of the culture.”

As I read this paragraph today I realized that Covey has described a very important part of my personal growth over this last decade. For the last ten years I have spent a great deal of time in pursuit of exactly where I had lost my personal center, how I had lost it and what I could do to regain it back. Though I wouldn’t have described it as “identity theft”, it does provide a beautiful metaphor of my life’s experiences.

External agendas, the cultural stories, and the political and social pressures from my parents, Dean’s parents, our community, school/work, and most of all our church, were very large in my life. I think these forces are simply powerful in all of our lives but what Covey is after here is helping us to understand that those forces should be EXTERNAL instead of INTERNAL. They are outside of us but all too often we adopt them as ourselves to the degree that we don’t even know our own minds anymore. When that happens, our identity is stolen.

When I lived out in Utah, most of these external forces were simply taken away from me. I wasn’t Mormon so no matter what the agenda of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I didn’t have to think of it the way those in the church often did. I grew to highly respect the church, its leaders and its ministries because I daily experienced very good things among the Mormon people. Knowing them made me dig deeper into my own faith in Christ and especially the Bible. I found ample space to ask what seemed like a million questions. I also found ample space to discover my own answers. I actually found faith – my own genuine faith without worry of pleasing anyone else.

While working in Logan, I worked with a lesbian woman. I got to know her and eventually her partner. They became friends of our family and we’re still in touch with them today. No cultural pressures, no external agendas guided me in forming a relationship with Elisha and Ann, my own heart led the way. I would have to say that my personal faith in treating others as I wanted to be treated and loving my neighbor as myself, proved to be ample guidance for me. There is something very solid in using one’s brain and heart together to determine one’s course.

I experienced a new sense of inner strength as I went home for a couple of weeks this month. I no longer felt suffocated by those agendas and forces that surrounded me because I have grown up and realized that they are not ME. I can respect them and see the good in them, but I don’t have to become them in order to be in the world. I do respect the way many of my friends and family members express their values but I no longer felt like a square peg pushing into a round hole. I was free to enjoy genuine friendship and good time with my parents and brother’s family even though they live very differently than I do. I respect them. I love them. I’m just not them. It’s a good place to be.

10 “Will Powers” for Improving Body Image

By: Michael Levine, PhD and Linda Smolak, PhD

I WILL ask myself: “Am I benefiting from focusing on what I believe are flaws in my body weight or shape?”

I WILL think of three reasons why it is ridiculous for me to believe that thinner people are happier or “better.” I will repeat these reasons to myself whenever I feel the urge to compare my body shape to someone else’s.

I WILL spend less and less time in front of mirrors—especially when they are making me feel uncomfortable and self-conscious about my body.   

I WILL exercise for the joy of feeling my body move and grow stronger. I will not exercise simply to lose weight, purge fat from my body, or to “make-up” for calories I have eaten.

I WILL participate in activities that I enjoy, even if they call attention to my weight and shape.I will constantly remind myself that I deserve to do things I enjoy, like dancing, swimming, etc., no matter what my shape or size is!

I WILL refuse to wear clothes that are uncomfortable or that I do not like but wear simply because they divert attention from my weight or shape. I will wear clothes that are comfortable and that make me feel at home in my body.

I WILL list 5 to10 good qualities that I have, such as understanding, intelligence, or creativity. I will repeat these to myself whenever I start to feel bad about my body.

I WILL practice taking people seriously for what they say, feel, and do. Not for how slender, or “well put together” they appear.

I WILL surround myself with people and things that make me feel good about myself and my abilities. When I am around people and things that support me and make me feel good, I will be less likely to base my self-esteem on the way my body looks.

I WILL treat my body with respect and kindness. I will feed it, keep it active, and listen to its needs. I will remember that my body is the vehicle that will carry me to my dreams! 

We all know that reaching perfection is nearly as impossible as trying to exist on the earth without taking a breath, yet undaunted by such a reality, we press on toward it anyway. LIving among others like us makes this quest even more intense and personal. I don’t know if it’s possible to really live in the western world and NOT strive for perfection to some  extent.

I’m a perfectionist extraordinaire. I want a perfect lawn, a perfect entry way to my house, a perfect living room, kitchen…you get the idea. I read self-help books like they are manuals to perfection and do my best to employ their advice, until I find the advice “not for me” and I allow myself to move on. I’m not very good at thinking it is okay to move on if I’ve only skimmed a concept. I must delve to the depths of it and try to master it. It has been a good quality to have at times, deadly at others. In over my head as an EBD teacher in Minnesota, not only was perfection unattainable, survival was. I didn’t quit until my body made it very clear that I had no choice. That’s me. Never give up, especially if others are watching. If I’m living in any kind of arena where others are assessing the situation, it is vital that I continue pressing on. It’s so extreme sometimes that it’s as if I’m in a concentration camp and don’t have the freedom to practice good self care or let go of a project when it becomes too much. My body has paid a real cost for this bent of mine. In the quest for recovery from whatever it is I’m recovering from, I find that there is no shortage of healers and those who have found a way to profit from my imperfection. I’ve bought endless books and taken countless formulas of vitamins and pharmaceuticals in the quest to heal from my many falls along the way. I ache to return to the state of mankind in the Garden of Eden. I want to live without error but I simply cannot.

So how do I move forward? How do I heal and find balance. My life has been lived in circles of events beginning with visions that are so real and empowering that I dive in head first every time and all too often without an awareness of the depth of the water. If it’s too shallow I break something and if it’s too deep, I nearly drown. My quest to get “it” right has cost me so much that I’ve lived in emotional wheel chair unable to make it on my own. That making it on my own thing is a huge problem for a woman with a heart for equality. Crashing and burning has cost me so much over these 52 years. This last round nearly cost me my life. How do I move forward with so many voices offering suggestions? How do I give them a fair hearing when I’m so overwhelmed? Why do I have to feel guilty if I say no? Why do I feel guilty if I say no? There is no shortage of passion in the pursuit to heal. Sometimes this cacophony of voices simply paralyzes me. I don’t want to be immobile because I do want to heal. At times I just want to scream out and say, “Leave me alone”. BUT the pill in that is that I don’t want to be alone…even left alone. I always wonder, “Could this be the thing to take care of what ails me?”

Perhaps what I need most is to stand up and say, “I have what I need to heal already within me. I have been given a mind that is able to seek and find its way. A heart that is eager to be reborn. Sometimes, the most healing thing is simply when another human is just with me, with me without advice…just present and trusting me to find my way. When friends like Tom and Mari in Nebraska open their home for their friend…me. They just enjoy being with me. Their presence, their acceptance, their empathy and their joy in my being with them gave me space to deal with what was taking place inside of me. They don’t have a litmus test for friendship with me. I don’t have to reach a standard of perfection to sit at their table and enjoy a meal with them. I can be angry, I can be sad, and I can be exceedingly happy with these friends. In other words, the imperfection of it all is very healing. It is very grounding and safe.  Isn’t that quite lovely?

My spiritual life is rooted in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. I was baptized in that denomination as an infant. I was confirmed there at 14. At 16, after hearing the gospel according to Evangelicals, I was “born again” and left this heritage behind me. At the time, I believed that the Lutherans had it wrong and the Evangelicals had it right. Thus began my active participation.

I became a leader in the Evangelical movement in my high school and pursued that life of faith through college and well into my married life. It worked for me. It gave me a center, a locus of control, if you will. My life was all about Evangelical Christian faith and experiencing God here on earth. Then, God  interrupted my leadership, threw me into a tornado of wildness and reshaped everything I ever thought I knew about God. Grace overwhelmed me in an unexpected place.

A psychiatrist at the Children’s Hospital Eating Disorders Program in Omaha was the vehicle of this first unexpected encounter with grace like I’d rarely ever seen it before. After our daughter’s intake, she sat us down to explain to us what she was really dealing with. As our chins dropped and we tried to catch our breath, she looked my husband and I in the eyes and told us that we needed to understand how traumatic our daughter’s premature birth and subsequent medical traumas were to her. She told us her journey to recover would be complex and take time. Then she went on to say that we had done the right thing in bringing her there and had actually done it just in time as she was admitted on the verge of a heart attack from electrolyte imbalance. I remember the room was small and quiet. I remember feeling the overwhelming emotions sitting there with my husband. I remember, grace.

That moment would define the next next decade of my life. Ironically my daughter’s name  actually means FULL OF GRACE. Her being in our lives has made this true OF our lives. Everyday since that one has been full of the paradox of living in the middle of life’s greatest pain and deepest joy. I think that is my personal definition of what it means to actually live in grace.  It is that space where, if you are open to it, God’s Spirit comes to you and gives you the courage to face your pain head on and without the whimpering victimization so common in our western mind. In this grace place, you are allowed  full out wailing. You are allowed the freedom to actually say that some of the people in your life are down right mean in their righteous assessments of you. You can let them go.

When grace comes in the unexpected places, you find that within the walls of that room it is safe to feel…or be confused…or very angry…you  can hold on because you have discovered that you are in the room forever with all that comes and goes in and out of your every moment. In Grace you are able to receive amazing gifts, first because you can actually see them but also because they are so abundant that you can’t avoid them.

Grace is life.

Unlike me, Dean did not delete his Facebook account. He even gave me the password to it so I can check it now and then to see if my niece Melissa has posted new photos of her little man on it. I did and she has. As I scrolled through the page I remembered why I had to leave that lovely little social networking site. In minutes I read about 1) stupid people and idiots 2)Abercrombie and something about them not wanting ugly people representing their line of clothes 3) How Obama and the liberals are doing things that should really TERRIFY me 4)How good people are the most wealthy 5)How God blesses me but not you…should I go on. 

I understand that I filter everything through my own worldview and as a result I’m one who also filters life through the emotions…I’m considered an HSP – Highly Sensitive Person. Ya think? Fortunately though, I also have a brain and as my brain filtered the posts I saw, all I could think was, wow, it’s been SO NICE to be IN my life here, in touch with people I genuinely care about and not feel the need to even comment on the things that I find just ridiculous. What’s really great is that the next time I see most of those who post things like I mention here, they won’t ever SAY A THING like they are willing to post on Facebook. I will go back into the cave of not knowing their real thoughts or intentions and can pretend that they are more like me than they really are. We can be civil to each other. In some cases we can choose a difficult topic, dialog about it and end as friends, both having learned from each other. 

I planned to create a new page in the fall where I can be much more careful about who I accept as a friend so that it can be a fun place to stay in touch with people. BUT I’m rethinking that today. I’m wondering how much I spoke up about things and engaged in conversations I would never have had the courage to do in a face to face situation when I posted on Facebook. This morning I feel a bit like someone threw up on me and it’s been really great to be away from that for awhile. I’m betting I “threw up” on some others and they likely aren’t missing me that much either.

It is May 3, and we had snow here today. As I endeavor to love Minnesota, I realized that even when snow falls late in the spring it is still quite pretty. What is also interesting is that the snow itself doesn’t change. Snow is, well, snow; frozen little drops of water. What changes is us. It is our perception of the snow. Suddenly,  the same element in nature that one day we are in awe of and taking photos of, cannot be valued in the same way, until next year when we are okay with it being winter. Then, SNOW gets to enjoy our judgment of being “good”.

Take for example these photos…two days I experienced when snow was deemed good for me…two glorious days in the snow. One of these days was in the Wasatch Mountains of Northern Utah, the other, right after Thanksgiving in Duluth, Minnesota…that evening it was the first snow of the season and fell on a newly set up Christmas light display, it was magical and the first of one of the record-breaking year…they are quite ready for it all to melt at present.

I am convinced that one of the greatest truths out there is that we see the world as we are and not necessarily as it. Snow is just frozen water that has to change in response to cold temperature but it will be judged by humans until the end of time…it is just the way we are.

I am processing this today because I’m trying to understand the whole concept of judgment in my own life and how much it colors my world. Jesus, told us not to judge because we could be judged the very same way. I know you’ve had that happen to you just like I have. You pass sentence on someone and before you know it, it is YOU doing the exact same thing. One funny one for me…or not so funny depending on the day, is that I sat by this woman on a plane going to Minneapolis. She was debating whether or not to follow her who boyfriend to Utah or stay in Minnesota for her great job. I was thinking, “Lady, it’s a no-brainer, head to Utah: Life Elevated!!” It wasn’t just a few months later and guess who was moving to Minnesota?? I’m not making this up.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that this because I am becoming VERY aware that my inner world is a judgmental machine. Always classifying and ordering life based on my preferences. It kind of “is”  a certain way because I make it so. It has very little to do with what it actually IS.

Today, I chose to see the snow without a judgment. It was just snow. It was a bit easier to do because unlike my neighbors to the south here in Minnesota, I’m not dealing with another 12″ or more. Nonetheless, I am really longing for some warm days in the yard, anxious to plant some flowers…