You will never see me
Protesting
against any targeted group of human beings
Or for violence
or for injustice
or hatred
or genocide
or for any peoples to be wiped off the map
or for any type of human to be dehumanized
or discarded like garbage.
I won’t do these things
regardless of context.
There are 2 items. If you cannot find the simple will to condemn them, I have no responsibility to respect your moral standing on anything else.
— the legal killing of unborn children
—the violent sexual torture—to the point of death—of civilian women and children because of their ethnicity/faith
These are basic. You don’t get points for defending someone less needy until you care about these.
If you are rationalizing, excusing or whatabouting these unjust and cruel acts, you are morally irrational and no one has to listen to you.
Normalize Defiance: If it Seems Wrong, SAY NO
I think we should teach one kind of defiance to our children. Total, stubborn, righteous defiance. I have seen too many accounts of innocent children being abused in which a child is told by an adult to submit, to do what the adult says, actions to which children acquiesce because they are taught that it is their lot to obey adults.
We groom kids in so many ways to be open to manipulation by grown ups. Children are hard-wired to innocently trust and to be teachable. Adults have the power. That’s why the Bible prescribes a millstone around the neck and throwing into the sea to someone who corrupts a child by taking advantage of his innocence.
We give our children simplistic rules to obey when we ought to be teaching them moral discernment to apply. To be compliant machines rather than thinking humans with agency.
I do believe that a child needs a firm and caring authority, a person who the child loves and trusts but who is the one they look to for moral guidance, and who is the final say-so who fairly limits behavior. This authority must be understanding but consistently firm as well. This is a need, for by that guidance one learns not only to self-regulate but to apply justice in the greater world and to judge right from wrong in all situations, for him or herself.
But alongside this “trust mommy’s oughts and ought-nots” we must begin to teach our kids to evaluate morally and give them permission to adjust their obligations to obey or to trust other authority figures. My child is not obligated to obey all grown ups! Nor should she apply obedience blindly to anyone who says they are in authority.
This will necessitate teaching them, instead of unquestioning obedience– true moral understanding. They will need to know what’s right and what’s wrong. They will need to respect an objective morality as authoritative, as the means to safety, as a trusted friend. If a supposedly trusted adult asks them to do something wrong, they should hold the moral standard above the authority of the adult. The child is then able to evaluate the trustworthiness of the adults in his or her life as well.
So if little Jane is asked by her step grandmother to shower with her, little Jane has the permission and the confidence to say NO. And to acknowledge to herself that that’s creepy. If little Zac is asked by his softball coach to come alone with him to his house to get ice cream, he has the encouragement and the confidence to say NO. And to acknowledge to himself that that’s not a socially acceptable invitation. And if teenage Emily doesn’t like having to hug that particular relative, she should listen to her feelings and put her foot down.
We should teach our kids what normal and safe requests are like, and what isn’t normal for adults to ask of them. We should teach boundaries and bodily autonomy but also simply to trust their instincts: If ANYTHING feels wrong to you or even makes you uncomfortable, do not do it. Refuse and do your best to leave that person’s presence.
Sure, there will be misjudgments but better to offend an adult than to end up in a tragic situation. Preserving the innocence of a child is worth so much more than protecting our adult feelings.
And this is the real message: adults should do the hard things and handle the slights. Kids should not be expected to accommodate adults; adults should protect kids.
I want my children and grandchildren to know that I will respect their autonomy, their judgements, and especially their courage in doing the right thing and keeping themselves safe. Because I can’t always be there to protect them, I want them to have the agency to keep themselves safe.
My illness is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It is also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is like calling Alzheimer’s Chronic Senior Moment Syndrome.
I have had to navigate this on my own: research, diagnose, and manage it. I don’t say treat because there is no treatment. There is only careful and informed, or intuitive and haphazard, self-management.
It needs counterintuitive management. The more you strive or push, the more you are tempted to exercise— the sicker you become. So you have to obey it. You must listen to the illness, to how you feel, and act accordingly. If your body or brain says to lie down, do it.
Stop planning. Stop being efficient, stop acting. Rest. Do as little as possible, physically, mentally, emotionally. Let the waves roll over you. Suspend yourself and wait…wait…wait.
PEM is the telltale feature. Post Exertional Malaise. If you exert yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, too much— and how much too much is changes all the time— you will be hit with the nasty payback. It will be delayed typically 24 to 48 hours after the effort. Exhaustion and reassertion of symptoms all out of proportion to the exertion. This could last a day or forever.
When and if you reach a state of stability, after “rolling crashes” have faded, you can begin to be somewhat proactive. But you must keep your hard earned understanding of listening to your body and obeying. Here I should define rolling crash:
A crash is what it’s called when your symptoms suddenly worsen and become debilitating. A crash may last anywhere from a week to the rest of your life.
Rolling crashes are when your illness is severe and you are experiencing crashes from the activities of baseline existing. You’re already bed-bound, but it gets too hot so you crash the next few days. You roll over in bed too many times and you feel flu-like for awhile. You felt well enough to get a real shower so you crash the next few days. You got upset or worried about a family conflict so you crash. After each crash you work (rest) your way back to your horrendous baseline just in time for something else beyond your control to flatten you.
Once you teach a more stable place, you can begin to pace. Do not push. Do half of what you feel up to, if you can figure out what half is. Rest is an investment in future wellness. Bank your rest.
Pace. Rest. Here I define pace:
Pacing is the most effective method of managing this illness. Very basically, it means deliberately stopping activity and resting at predetermined intervals. Doing things in chunks then resting, taking planned naps, things like that. Resting before you get active again—until you get back to symptom relief, or until you regain your baseline.
I have had at least two, probably three, major crashes in those years. During two of them I was bed bound for months. Each time, I did gradually improve and become functional again. It is not so for everyone. And if I push too much or contract another major virus or experience major stress for an extended time, I could crash again, and that could happen to me.
Aside from major crashes, at my now-best, I live in a state of wildly fluctuating illness, tuning out a sizable collection of symptoms which would be alarming to a healthy person, to varying success.
Things which are outrageous:
I have had it for at least 33 years. I have met almost no one who has even a general understanding of what I have. This includes medical professionals. You really can’t say that about many illnesses.
At first, when I was experiencing my first awful crash, I had no idea what was wrong with me. I remained clueless even though I consulted several specialists. So I lay in bed, with no idea if I was dying (I felt like I was), or how long it would last, or whether I would recover. It was terrifying.
I have had to connect my own dots and it took decades.
I have presented collections of symptoms to doctors who should have connected them and concluded ME, but who did not.
I have been diagnosed with depression and given meds, in other words, misdiagnosed.
I have been prescribed graded exercise, which is a prescription for worsening your condition, maybe permanently.
I have been told to go to somebody else. (I am not difficult.)
I have had to self-diagnose comorbid conditions and to understand their relationships to ME.
I have had to learn to identify and evaluate many symptoms, and assess each symptom’s seriousness on my own. Is this ME related or do I have something a GP could handle? Am I about to keel over or is this just that thing I figured out was POTS? (Or both?) Consequently, I do ignore symptoms most of the time which would be alarming to most people.
I have had to confront and learn to evaluate the alternative and the exploitative avenues of medicine, and sort out the useful from the garbage. That took years. It’s usually an expensive learning experience.
Friends and family:
My own family, my husband and children, are understanding and have given me all the support I’ve needed, and that’s saying a lot. When you cannot stand up long enough to shower or get food, when you can only endure another person in the room talking to you for a few minutes, you’re completely dependent on their grace. They believed me and I have no complaints. I have a few precious understanding friends. But if I move outside of that circle I only sometimes find the same comprehension.
People get impatient with your non-recovery. They are incredulous and scornful at your insistence on not recovering in what they think is a reasonable amount of time. People get well, right? or else they die.
People demand proof from you, in not so many words. They think you are malingering. Or else they call and never mention it, in which case neither do I. There is no room in their imagination for the reality of chronic illness unless they get one.
We place all our children in a central, showy location and ADVERTISE that it’s a gun-free zone. There are no weapons here, potential shooters. Don’t worry, the kids and the teachers are defenseless.
And then we blame other people when the kids actually are threatened or attacked. Somebody in the government should have done something to PREVENT this. The people not doing SOMETHING are cruel and selfish. They don’t care if kids_________________.
We social media complain about how dangerous being in school is for our kids, and virtue signal shake our heads about it.
And every school day, five days a week, 180 days a year, we send our kids to those schools.
Solution: if you are concerned about your child’s safety…don’t send them there.
Conversely, if you do send your kids there…I do not believe your parental fear or your virtue signal.
I’m a conservative but I would be behind gun restrictions if I thought that would prevent shootings. It definitely won’t. To think that gun legislation will equal zero more school shootings is magical thinking. In order to end mass shootings, we would need to literally disappear all guns, and that is not possible. Because it’s true that any remaining guns after a totalitarian confiscation (which would absolutely be necessary to collect all guns) would be liable to end up in the hands of the wrong people.
It’s magical thinking, it’s wishful thinking. It’s delusional. It makes them feel superior to say it and puts kids in danger.
So everybody virtuous is angry and outraged at what’s not being done and accusing everyone who isn’t doing what they want of horrible things. They will not consider any other solutions or discuss whether their solutions would work.
If my kids were school aged, I wouldn’t send them now unless there were designated not-obvious armed people on staff, trained to react appropriately in the event of such an emergency. And that fact was advertised. There is no other solution I can see.
For the record, I did not send my kids to school. We homeschooled, for many reasons.
Advent is a good time to read about the tiny child born in a manger, the humble beginnings of a remarkable life. But I am reading the omega of that story.
Let’s not pass thoughtlessly by the images in the Book of Revelation. Let’s not glaze over when we read the uncompromising declarations of Who He Is.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord,
“who is
and who was
and who is to come, the Almighty.”
“One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes like a flame of fire; His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead.”
“I am the First and the Last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death.“
“Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler over the kings of the earth.”
“To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever.”
And that’s only the first chapter!
The passages are visually astounding. The book is so visually strong. When we read Revelation, we feel like we’re strangers dropped off in a foreign country. That’s because we are. We are meant to feel overwhelmed, awed, small, lost. It is the place to open the eyes wide and be quiet, and to listen.
There are no grey areas in the declarations of His identity.
This Jesus-God from Revelation is the baby whose first cradle was a feeding trough. The all-powerful one is who He is now, without the disarming personas He wore in his obedience and humility before His Father while on the earth. This One of the Book of Revelation is the One with whom we must make our peace.
There is only one response possible in heaven toward this One.
Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, the living creatures, and the elders; and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice:
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain
To receive power and riches and wisdom,
And strength and honor and glory and blessing!”
And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying:
“Blessing and honor and glory and power
Be to Him who sits on the throne,
And to the Lamb, forever and ever!”
Then the four living creatures said, “Amen!” And the twenty-four elders fell down and worshiped Him who lives forever and ever.
Jesus of Nazareth was among us on earth as a humble wanderer, a simple teacher who yet could not be suffered to live by the powers that were. These are the things He told us:
“As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you…
You are my friends if you do what I command.
This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”
Let us remember Whose incarnation we are celebrating at this joyous Christmastime.
He came first as a newborn baby, as helpless and meek a creature as possible, in order to become one of us. The people of the world are at a disadvantage when we celebrate the lowly child’s birthday. It’s a comforting image; whether we regard the manger story as myth or history, we feel good about celebrating the poor underdog babe and congratulate ourselves on our insight about the disadvantaged child who would become the great teacher.
In the carol “We Three Kings,” each of the magi tells of his gift to the promised king. This verse from the third foreshadows Jesus’ life as a man:
Myrrh is mine: it’s bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom.
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.
We who believe celebrate the tiny babe. And we remember that he is also the simple teacher, the willing martyr and the Resurrected One. He is the one to whom we are absolutely accountable. Ultimately we must remember the One who revealed himself to John and showed us who He is and will ever be.
He will not be disregarded by anyone. This babe is really the one with all power, the One who will be the Judge of all the earth, the one with the Keys to Hell and Death.
Kiss the Son lest He be angry,
And you perish in the way,
When His wrath is kindled but a little.
Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him
The heavenly announcement that Immanuel had arrived first came to the least likely people. Shepherds were loners, spending most of each year outside of the cities and communities, keeping watch over sheep. They were an essential component of society but they were nevertheless part of an unsightly profession. They were probably the most remote, least social, most invisible people to spend this news upon.
The message came not to the important nor the socially connected. Not to the centers of city and government but to the forgotten wilderness. Why?
Consider that they were shepherds! Christ called himself a shepherd: we are his sheep. He lays down his life for the sheep. His sheep hear his voice and follow him. They trust him and only in him do they find comfort and safety. These men understood the role of the shepherd, and to shepherds first this Shepherd became known.
There is a simple principle in Scripture, and in God’s economy. The least will be greatest; the last shall be first. The father knows that it is the neglected, the humble, the poor who are likely awake to his message.
The shepherds were awake. Jesus Christ was born deep in the night. Most people were in every way asleep. The most significant announcement in all of human history did not put on an extravaganza in the palace of the most powerful ruler. Only these lonely shepherds, wide awake and vigilant, experienced an angel’s announcement and a heavenly host’s praise!
Note that we are commanded more than once to be, like the shepherds, “awake.” This piece of news was not anticipated nor expected. There had been no prophets for 400 years. Aside from Holy Writ, God’s voice had remained silent for generations. How astounding was it that these few overnight shift laborers encountered such a message! Almighty God opening his intentions to the world, sending a message of hope and comfort, through these humble men. What a privilege.
God has always commissioned humble messengers. The rich and powerful were rarely chosen to be the bearers of his message. The shepherds— poor, outcast, possibly unkempt — ran and told what they had seen and heard to everyone who would listen. They presented a challenge to their hearers! One had to meet their news with one’s own measure of humility in order to believe their story, and to join them in becoming “awake.”
Angels from God announce the births of John the Baptist and of Jesus the Christ. We marvel at Mary’s great faith when she humbly consents to the angel’s commission. We contrast her attitude with Zechariah’s, a request for proof from the angel. Both say something like, “How can this be?” But he is questioning the truth of the message while she is humbly asking how it could be accomplished (how can I have a baby, since I am a virgin? I am the Lord’s maidservant, but how?)
Given that Scripture records every person who is confronted with a heavenly messenger needing to be reassured first: “Do not be afraid,” both responses are remarkable.
Here is Zecharaiah, faced with an angel straight from the presence of God, overwhelming, terrifying. Yet he finds it appropriate to question whether the message could be true, and whether it will be possible for God to accomplish His will.
For Mary, the angel’s presence is enough. His appearance to her obliterated any need for proof, any doubts about what he would have to say. He is an emissary straight from God!
For Mary, the angel’s message is daunting but at the same time, reassuring. His words are straight from the God who sees her, knows her, blesses her above every other woman. She is one who honors God and she chooses to hear what He has to say in perfect trust.
Of the two, it is her response which is the more reasonable.
The world will not blaze a path for you because you are commissioned with God’s work. Think of Mary again. Wasn’t it enough, she might have complained silently, that I bore for a time the shame of unmarried pregnancy, that I bear this child, but I must be present NOW so far away to be accounted like a sheep? The census decreed by Augustus was timing’s perfect storm for Mary. She rode ninety miles on a beast of burden just before it was her time to give birth.
Many of you remember what that nine-month burden feels like: heavy, awkward, the “dropped” baby lying full weight on your bladder. Now imagine riding on a donkey for ninety miles just like that. Make no mistake—that was real misery. No doubt Mary bore the unbearable circumstances better than most of us would have.
It is enough to say this fallen world will only make it harder to do right, much less to bear the greatest burdens that the Lord asks of us.
To Mary:
For with God nothing shall be impossible.
To the disciples:
What is impossible with man is possible with God
when they wondered how a rich young ruler could send a camel through a needle’s eye.
Christ entering the womb of a virgin:
a baby where no baby could be.
Life created in an empty space
God living in a woman’s womb!
Christ entering the heart of each person:
Holiness, love, justice where
those things are not.
God present out of nothing, because we add nothing at all to God in our hearts.
But have we forgotten?
Creation.
God spoke life into a barren void
just like a virgin’s womb
like a human heart.
Messages from the Mythical 