A funny, yet tender writer, Sean Dietrich, made the light brighter for me. He says, “What we are all about is being love letters from God to each other.” That sums it all up. It isn’t about being perfect. It isn’t about being right. It isn’t about changing the world. It’s about being a love letter from God to the person in front of us at any given time. And that can be those reading our blog, seeing our painting, hearing our song, eating our cake, receiving our smile, gift certificates for a lunch at Wendys, getting our letter or phone call, or a hot bowl of homemade soup. That’s it guys. Do it. But remember to tell them you got it from God. God loves us all. Pass it on.
Our Differently Timed Spiritual Journeys from Need to Love
As a first time mom, I made lists of worries about my baby, but my pediatrician laughingly said, “Everyone should have a practice child!” After my second child was a few months old, I informed the pediatrician that it would not help at all, since my second child was absolutely nothing like my first! God did not make us with a cookie cutter. We are born with very different ways of both perceiving and responding to the world. But obviously we are ALL born as needy little babies and we’re all unfinished. Our lives are a spiritual journey from need to love. Some of us need a moment in time fairly early in life when we experience the unconditional love of God so we can cling to that love as a source of grace. Others are more logical and find the law to be a road map source of safety. Some of us tend to trust the known and traditional, while others explore possibilities of all kinds. Over our life spans, our different journeys will finally challenge us to experience a very different way of being in the world than we are used to. It’s scary and we may resist it, but it will free us finally to recognize the validity of our differences. This is grossly oversimplified. But whether we try to lock everyone into a law and order path or an emotionally healing conversion with miracles, or a social justice focus, we are like the three blind men each trying to picture a whole elephant by one only touching its floppy ears, another feeling it’s large firm side, and the third just feeling it’s skinny little tail. We see through the glass of our inborn personalities darkly. We are loved, but we are unfinished. It’s a lifetime process and we start at different place, so it’s a circle, NOT a hierarchy. And the journey isn’t to perfection, but to the balance of wholeness.. We are not only born unfinished, but some of us get broken along the way. The journey of Jesus is also OUR journey and he is with us every step of the way whether or not we recognize him. He fleshed out BOTH the Love of God for us, and the Way for us to become loving. It’s a process that will include loving those like ourselves, those who seem strange to us, those we consider spiritual lepers, and not only our enemy, but even our own Religious Leaders” who want the power to control us just as His once did him. “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Those words of Jesus ultimately will sum up our spiritual journey from need to love.
When we try to limit the Spiritual journey to the phase we are in, it creates a toxic religion for others. The timing is different because we started at different places. But we are ALL unfinished. So it’s time to begin trying to understand those on different pages, for our own sake, as much as theirs.
Finding Grace in Old Age
The challenges of old age can put me in a downward spiral sometimes. But lately I think my beginnings of dementia are showing a positive side. In volunteer work at my local Help Center to aid my granddaughter Hadley to get used to working with people she doesn’t know, I get pretty tired after standing for a couple of hours. But I recover more quickly than I used to, because I both enjoy the people we work with and it’s a good feeling at the end of the day to have helped not just my granddaughter, but other people too. Hadley has Autism so she is very good at detail, while I never was and am definitely not getting better since my brain leaks. We work well as a team now that she’s learned to remind me gently and kindly when I am forgetting. She loves to shop for hours, though often she doesn’t buy anything. I usually take a book to read with coffee somewhere. Today after I took her to see her cats and her dad a half hour away from my apartment, she ended up shopping for over an hour with me drinking coffee sans book. After a while I started focusing on the people coming and going. Soon, this led to praying for each of them. It kind of connected me to them and I actually began to care about them in a way. Some people were obviously from Arab countries, others looked and sounded like they came from Slavic countries, some were white and others black. It touched me particularly when two young men who weren’t together came in and sat near one another. One was wearing an earring and had a hat with a rainbow on it and the other had a sweatshirt from a Christian college that I get emails from. The emails have very enthusiastic reflections about Jesus and prayer, but are very politically conservative. Watching these two young men who are probably very different in many ways, because of my own experiences of the Love of God expressed in Jesus and also having two gays sons and a trans grandchild that I love very much, it gave me a feeling of an affectionate connection to both of them. I don’t know if my prayers for or my kind feelings toward the very varied and different people I saw there made much difference for them, but it transformed my day and somehow healed some of the fear and pain that today’s world has put in my heart. Sometimes I really do feel that if I am open to the world in the new ways in the amount of time that being 86 gives me, these may be the best years yet.
Prejudice For and Prejudice Against: My Life Experiences
This is a collection of stories about my experiences of being on both sides of prejudice from 1944 until 2023.
During World War II my mother became Civilian Personnel Director at an Army Air Force Base in Jackson, Mississippi. When she was due for a promotion and increase in salary, the Lieutenant who had to approve her promotion told her no “skirt” was going to make more than he had as a shoe salesman in civilian life and blocked her promotion. My mom came home fuming. But it turned out that the Army Hospital in Jackson was looking for a Civilian Personnel Director. Mother applied for the job. Though it was against the regulations for one arm of the service to proselytize from another, the Medics had mom officially declared a war time emergency, so she got the job and the promotion.
At seven years of age, my Dad having to go away to be in the army added to the prejudice I had from fear of bombs in black-outs and the newsreels at movies describing the cruelty of the Germans and Japanese. But while my mom was still working on the Army Air Base, part of her job was showing movies that the army made to boost the civilian employees’ morale. I heard her weeping when telling my grandmother about having to show a movie the army had made. It showed Japanese soldiers coming out of a cave surrendering with their hands up and the American soldiers setting them on fire with flame throwers and watching them burn alive. She said the other civilian personnel cheered.
Even though everything I saw or heard convinced me that both the Japanese and the Germans were horribly cruel, it seemed wrong for us to act like them.
The first and the only protest I ever participated in was after we had moved back to St. Louis. It wasn’t about an important issue, just my sense of an injustice by a mean old lady. When I was twelve, I was a bench warmer on the eighth-grade girls’ basketball team. After home games we always went to a small store near our school for cokes. They had a couple of large booths and we would all cram into one. After one game, someone accidentally knocked over a bottle of coca cola which not only spilled, but broke. The woman who owned the store yelled at us and told us to get out and never come back. I felt it was very unfair since we apologized and cleaned up the mess. After we went outside, I talked my teammates into staying to tell other kids to boycott the store. But when we told two boys not to go in because the woman was mean and unfair, they went in anyway. Then, as they were leaving, they threw their candy wrappers on the floor, calling her a witch and slamming the door. Not what I had wanted at all. The boys with their physical response had hijacked our peaceful protest. Before we could decide what to do, the woman told us she had called the police. The rest of the team took off. Self-righteous me stayed. Sure enough, a very large policeman appeared. The policeman listened to the lady and then admonished me for inciting the boys to cause trouble and wrote down my name and address. I was warned to stay away from the store. I was struggling to not cry or throw up, scared that as a newspaperman my dad would see the police report. The policeman was going the way I was and when we got away from the store, he tore up the paper with my name on it, handed it to me and said, “Don’t worry. She calls us every other day about something. Just stay away for a while until she gets over it.” I was very grateful to the kind policeman. My inclination to protest what I considered unfair was tempered by realizing that while I might protest peacefully, I couldn’t keep others from being violent.
About this time my parents hosted a Great Books discussion group that included a young black man. I knew my Dad was against racial discrimination because the only time he ever paddled me was for using the “N” word. But I saw for myself that the young black man could hold his own intellectually. That probably did more to make me question prejudice than anything.
When I was fourteen, we visited my grandparents in New Orleans. I got to take a bus and go shopping on my own downtown. When I got on the bus, there was only one unoccupied seat halfway toward the back. I sat down, but the driver didn’t start the bus. Finally, the black woman sitting in the window seat asked me to let her get by so she could stand up. I looked around and realized that all the blacks were sitting in the back, so I just said, “Oh no, I’ll stand up.” But even when I was standing, the driver didn’t start the bus. The woman stood up and whispered, “Please sit down or we won’t be going anywhere.” So, I sat down, and she stood. I was embarrassed and angry, but afraid of making things worse.
When I was sixteen my dad was now City Editor of the Houston Post in Texas. When the schools were still segregated, he wrote an editorial supporting a black woman for the school board so the black schools would at least have representation. She didn’t win, but about 2 am on election night before Dad got home, our doorbell rang. I got halfway down the stairs before what sounded like an explosion sent me running back up. Someone had put a homemade bomb in the foyer of our apartment. It wasn’t as powerful as bombs people make today, but it had enough force that both the confetti packing, and razor-sharp pieces of slate stuck in the walls and door. The FBI never found out who did it, but they thought it was a response to dad’s editorial. I struggled to understand how anyone could hate so much that they would try to maim or possibly kill someone who had never done anything to harm them. My feeling of being safe in my world was shattered that night. I began to understand that I had experienced just a tiny bit of the fear people in minorities felt all their lives.
When I was 30 living in Nashville, my husband I were having a dinner party for our church going social group of doctors and lawyers, and college professors. One of the wives who did volunteer charity work at a hospital bragged about rudely refusing in front of the parents to carry a “Nigger” baby to the car. I was so disgusted, I decided to volunteer at the NAACP headquarters interviewing people for job applications. Then I would go back to my own neighborhood and try to get retail stores to hire some of the people qualified for the work. This was before laws on diversity in hiring. Of course, I had absolutely no success getting any of the merchants to hire anyone black, but I continued to volunteer twice a month at the NAACP headquarters. So, when the poor people’s march on Washington came through Nashville in 1968, I was answering the phone there. The young black men, who were activists in SNCC and CORE, were much more aggressive than most that followed Martin Luther King, Jr. They were hanging out in the office waiting to get back on the buses. Their hatred of whites, even those of us trying to help black people get equal rights, was so frightening that I became convinced that violence was unavoidable. The thought of what that would be like, not just for my own children, but the innocent young children I had tutored in a black school, broke my heart. While Martin Luther King, Jr. was not perfect, his faith in the non-violence of Jesus saved us from a bloody race war. I don’t think white people appreciate what he did for us also.
My husband was a very kind and ethical man, but he was influenced growing up in a very Southern environment to be prejudiced. I don’t think he was comfortable with my activism at first and it did take about seven years for him to decide prejudice was wrong. But once he did, he acted on it. He was President of the first all-white Architecture firm in Nashville to hire a young black architect long before any diversity laws. To me, it takes a rare combination of intelligence and humility to recognize when you are wrong and true courage to act on that in a culture that has not yet accepted that.
Prejudice doesn’t look past the surface. It doesn’t recognize that all races, genders, nationalities, religions, and social groups are diverse within their own group.
In 1993 at the age of 56, I was in a wheelchair when traveling in the Czech Republic, in Austria, and Lucerne, Switzerland. In Prague I was blocked from getting out of the rain onto a covered sidewalk by several middle-aged women who also literally hissed angrily at me as we had to go past them in the street. In German speaking Lucerne we encountered a taxi driver at the airport, who wouldn’t take us even though he had a large car with a huge trunk for the wheelchair. His rude refusal made the second taxi have to drive over a median to get around him to take us. At that time prejudice was so strong against people with handicaps, they were kept in their family’s attics and were never taken out. The only handicapped accessible bathrooms were in the airports and the McDonalds. But, when we were in the airport on the way home from Lucerne, we and another tourist family with someone in a wheelchair were very rudely separated almost out of sight from the seating area with our families left standing for forty-five minutes until everyone else was on the plane. When we got home, we read of someone in Germany actually winning a $20,000 lawsuit against a hotel for ruining their vacation by allowing a handicapped person to eat in the dining room. I wept at being rejected by people who had no idea if I was a kind person, an intelligent person, or even a person just temporarily hurt in an accident. Since I grew up during WWII and was aware of the horrors that Germans inflicted on Jews, gays, and the handicapped, when I experienced hate based on prejudice by people who spoke German in the 1990’s, my own latent prejudice against Germans surfaced. But when writing about this, I realized that most of the people I encountered on that trip were not unkind. Only a few were actually mean. Intellectually, I believe that many Germans are kind, good people, and some died resisting the Nazis, but I still have to struggle against assuming they are all cruel and hostile toward people different from them. That’s what prejudice does; it prejudges people without actually knowing them. I also began to have some idea of how important it is to Germans to be physically strong. Everywhere in Germanic countries in good weather whole families were out climbing mountain trails. A young woman from Germany that I worked with in ministry for years told me that she would rather die than be in a wheelchair. Often fear underlies prejudice.
Power, prejudice, and a violent temperament are an explosive and dangerous combination. In the late 1940’s when we lived in St. Louis, Missouri, my dad was investigating an unarmed Mexican being beaten to death in his jail cell and no one questioning it. In Houston, Texas in the early 1950’s he was writing about the Texas Rangers getting confessions by tying standing prisoners to heaters so if they got tired and slumped, they would be burned. Obviously, some of both the Police and Rangers were honest and kind because they were the ones giving dad the information. Most law enforcement officers are good people in not only a hard and dangerous job, but one with frequent temptations to abuse power. There needs to be a system that instead of protecting those that abuse power, rewards those that don’t. In times of civil unrest, being the police takes extraordinary character, courage, and self-control. When you need exceptional people for extremely difficult jobs, you need to pay them exceptional pay.
When I began to work as a Director of Religious Education for the Chaplains’ Division at Fort Campbell, I had some prejudice against the “Military Establishment.” But I saw that now that we have both men and women in the military and posts and bases all over the world, our military families represent the United Nations. And because the military life is hard on marriages, you can even have all sorts of blends racially and ethnically in children in one family through remarriages in different countries. On posts or bases there are no ghettos to live in or private schools to keep races or ethnic groups apart. Seeing most of the people, particularly the youth, get along across so many differences gave me more hope for world peace than I had ever had.
Also, the respect I received from the Protestant Chaplains, particularly the Presbyterians was incredibly different from the cavalier way the Catholic Chaplains treated women. I had done every ministry that women were allowed to do and completed over fifteen hundred class hours in Scripture, Theology, Religious Education, and Conflict Resolution, When I stopped working at Fort Campbell, I enrolled in a Diocesan Ministry training program that was two years for women and three years for men wanting to become Deacons who are allowed to preach. Because of my Religious Education credentials and all the Ministries I had done at the Diocesan level the men wanting to become Deacons asked me to write letters of recommendation for them. After three of them admitted they didn’t really understand or even like reading the Scriptures and dreaded having to preach, I realized that out of all the ministries I had done, bringing the Scriptures alive for others and relating them to everyday life not only gave me the most joy, but was what I did best. I felt so frustrated by the Catholic male hierarchy’s prejudice against women, I decided to find a church where I could preach. Out of the various denominations I had explored when searching and ones I had worked with in my position with the military, the most positive experiences were with the Presbyterian USA who do let women preach. Now for twenty years I have had opportunities to experience the joy of preaching what I call “sermons from the molehill” as a member of that denomination. I still read and find spiritual wisdom in some Catholic writers along with writers of other denominations. And I realize that the Catholic Church doesn’t have a monopoly on prejudice against women. But I thank God for the opportunities I’ve had to do what I love and feel called to do. And I am convinced that prejudice against any group delays the Kingdom of God from flourishing on earth.
However, an experience in my job in the Chaplain’s Division also made me aware of my own prejudice FOR some groups. I had never realized that we can be prejudiced FOR people, which affects our perception of reality also. I was going with one of my volunteers to get her teen-age son out of the stockade. He’d done something silly, not serious, but her husband was overseas, so I was being support for her. As we were sitting in the waiting room, four tough looking white MP’s came in all roughly manhandling a very muscular black soldier who was dragging heavy chains with manacles on both wrists and ankles. I immediately felt sorry for the black soldier and felt the chains were over-kill. But when I got back to work, the gentle, pretty eighteen-year-old private that worked in our office was there sobbing. She was a committed Christian, who had become so depressed by the cursing and fighting in her barracks that she had hiked down the busy highway while it was still daylight to spend the night in a motel to pray and have some peace. That morning, she was hiking back in the dark to be at roll call at dawn. There was very little traffic, and she was attacked and raped at knife point in the ditch along the highway. Her attacker was the soldier I had seen in chains. He had fled over a fence back onto the post when a trucker spotted them and slowed down. But in fleeing he left his wallet behind, so he was caught. I could only hold her and cry with her. We cannot assume either evil or good for anyone because they are different from us or belong to an oppressed people.
In his forties, my very religious brother finally accepted the reality that he was gay and wanted to love someone in a committed intimate relationship. He experienced extremely difficult challenges because of being gay. I was sad for him, not because he was gay, but because of the handicap and even danger of it in our society. He and his husband have been together almost forty years. Many years ago one of my sons also accepted that he was gay. Again, I worried about how difficult and even dangerous prejudice would make my son’s life. But he moved to California and found acceptance and a wonderful relationship that has stood the tests of almost thirty years. Because I have learned of a great-great aunt that was gay over a century ago, I think it must be an inherited trait. I had never heard anything about this aunt until looking at a cousin’s family photo album. When I asked who the beautiful woman dressed appropriately for the very early 1900 hundreds was, my cousin said she was a great-great aunt who became a pediatrician and started a clinic for poor children in California. I was astonished. First, because I had never heard of her and second, at how intelligent and strong she must have been to become a doctor back then. When I asked why I had never heard of her, my cousin said, “See the woman in the background of the photo?” I nodded. “She lived with her all her life.” It blew my mind that my family kept this amazing woman a secret because she loved and lived with a woman all her life. Living with someone all your life is an achievement in itself. In fact, I truly believe that marriage is the ultimate school for learning to love another imperfect human being. And to me, learning to love unconditionally is the purpose of life.
Now in my eighties, I have a transgender grandchild. Being gay has become less dangerous, but transgenders are still bullied, humiliated, and even physically harmed. I love all my grandchildren. And as a born-again Christian who accepted Jesus as my Savior and Lord and experienced that incredible “no small print” love, I pray for grace to follow Him in loving all God’s children.
To me, Jesus calls us to love and treat others as He loved and treated them: heretic Samaritans, the unclean woman, gentiles, lepers, tax collectors, the woman with five husbands, and even the soldier of the hated conquerors. He came down the hardest on the Pharisees who had turned the Law into an idol. But even when they killed him, He prayed, “God forgive them. They know not what they do.”
All races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, religions, handicapped, and professions have people of all kinds in them spread out between loving to hating, compassionate to judgmental, gentle to violent, honest to dishonest, understanding to judgmental, prejudiced for to prejudiced against, and every other dichotomy.
There are both loving and hateful people in every group with most of us somewhere in the middle. And God loves us all.
I Put all my Chips on Jesus, So I’m Going to be Seriously Pissed if Old Age is Better than the Alternative.
Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest. Larry Lorenzon
Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.
The idea is to die young as late as possible. Ashley Montagu
There’s one advantage of being 102, there’s no peer pressure. Dennis Wolfberg
I don’t do alcohol anymore-I get the same effect just standing up fast.
I was thinking about how people seem to read the bible a lot more as they get older, then it dawned on me-they’re cramming for their final exam. George Carlin
It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone. Andy Rooney
The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened. Mark Twain
At my age flowers scare me. George Burns
Intelligence and Smarts
Accepting that people who have lived different lives than you will want different things and will see the world differently helps you recognize that what look like debates are often just people with different life experiences talking over each other, unable to hear one another.
Henry Ford said, “If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to actually understand the other person’s point of view and be able to see things from their angle as well as your own.”
Since everyone has different needs and experiences, the only way to move forward and get things done is to tolerate and work with some views even when you disagree with them. If you think there is only one right answer to every problem, you will insist on banging through more debate until the other side agrees with you, often just cementing them into their position.
It takes smarts to accept that for most problems in the world, your idea of the “right” answer is the one that promotes your own wellbeing and fits your understanding of how the world works. But since everyone has different needs and experiences, the only way to move forward and get things done is to not only tolerate, but to work with some views even when you disagree with them. The outcome if you can do this is getting along with people you disagree with. It is indispensable.
People who understand various fields may be intelligent, but understanding how the world works requires smarts. Many people are knowledgeable in their field but are oblivious to how interconnected the world is and how foreign other peoples’ life experience may be to their own.
Often we buy into tribal thinking. That’s when if a person knows your opinion on one thing, they can pretty well tell how you will think on all others. Independent thinking frees us to agree with people on some topics but not others. Both agreeing or disagreeing on every topic with someone or some group indicates an unquestioned knee jerk reaction.
No matter how convinced you are of your truth, realize that the most powerful truth does no good if you can’t get people to listen enough to at least understand why you believe it.
The most successful people have an ability to express their ideas effectively even to people who tend to question or challenge them. Truth has to be seen in the context of life experience. It has to be fleshed out in ways different people can hear it. Often that starts with finding a point of agreement and going from there. But that takes you being open enough to find that point and also trying to understand what fears and life experiences block the other person from being able to hear you well enough to think independently.
Giving ideas a life context is a soft emotional skill. And it takes understanding why the other person thinks the way they do. Intelligence and smarts are not the same. But both are important.
( Eileen: A lot of this is from the context of an article by Morgan Housel. It’s a blend of my ideas and understanding of what he writes about the difference between and the importance of both intelligence and smarts.)
The Spiritual Journey to Wholeness
I am an idealist: The positive is that I want to make things better and often can. The negative is that since nothing and no one is perfect in this life, I have to fight the tendency to always be unhappy with what is.
I’m a people person: Relationships are important to me. The positive is that I reach out to people and notice and can respond to their obvious needs. The negative is that many people are not about relationship and either don’t notice my needs or find them overwhelming.
I respond to life emotionally first. The positive is that I care about people and want to help them. The downside is that I am not logical about limits to what I or others can do and am susceptible to giving up on using my gifts and sometimes on relationships.
I am intuitive which helps me be open to new ideas and possibilities and see connections that others may not see between cause and effect. The downside is that sometimes I connect things people do, or do not say or do, to motivations that aren’t real.
I focus on ideas, thoughts, and possibilities which can help me be creative and open to learning new things. But the downside is I often literally don’t SEE the concrete world around me that is important to others.
We are born with different tendencies to personal focus and values, so we have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, but our birth families and lives may challenge us to develop coping skills different, but less effective, than our natural gifts. So the degree of focus and competence will vary some, but generally not completely. We literally see and hear differently in the same situation. We did not get to chose this. And it affects everything.
The differences for all of us are loosely: Focus outward vs focus inward. Focus on the concrete and known vs seeking new ideas and possibilities. Responding to people and the world from logic vs emotions. The need to move quickly to closure/decisions vs wanting to stay open to other possibilities.
Our upbringing and early influences and survival needs can affect the strength and thus the balance of these tendencies, but will not wipe them out. So we can end up being a square peg in a round hole in our lifestyles, professions, relationships, and even religions.
I stress type differences because it was what I studied and actively worked with for twenty years and understanding it made a huge difference in my marriage of sixty years, since Julian and I were extreme opposites in every area of differences.
This does make marriage more challenging, but once understood it can not only help stay together, it can help us grow and change and become more balanced and understanding of those different from ourselves and free us to love across differences.
What I am working on understanding is if those of us who are : focused outward, open to possibilities, and inclined to stay open to possibilities may be called to lead in attempts to understand one another, so we can allow and maybe even benefit from a balance in these personality traits. Understanding frees us from hating and judging.
But it really has to begin by understanding and accepting the reality of our own strengths and weaknesses. For me understanding these differences helped me value my strengths and understand why some things are so hard for me and that I had to often learn by failing. This eventually not only helped me forgive myself for my failures, but to forgive those I love for their undeveloped sides. We’ve all got them, because we are unfinished human beings.
Now, something I began to recognize in my sixties was that I was becoming more capable in my weak areas, but at the temporary cost of my strengths even in my ways of being open to grace. Since women tend to share both their ups and downs, friends around my age began to struggle with the same thing. It began to occur to me that the second half of life is a series of dying to strengths (self) so we can develop our weak side. This is a journey to wholeness, perhaps holiness.
It’s nothing short of miraculous. When Julian was dying those two years, he needed caregiving in ways that used to would have been impossible for me. I’m sure since he knew me so well, that it was terrifying when I had to do things to/for him that required focus on small physical details and using physical skills that he knew I didn’t have! God bless him! And yes, it was scary and challenging for me and at the end I was grateful that he could have professional medical care in the nursing home though I stayed with him there for five months. But what a blessing for me. I was able to love him in ways I never could have before. And if we are open to these challenges of change, we will not only be able to love in ways we have never loved before, but to also better understand and love those very different from us. No one dies perfect, but we can die like Jesus did, understanding even our enemies.
The Beginning of My Spiritual Journey from Need to Love
Old age is like climbing a hill and watching trains go by. You can see all the parts of your life with their huge differences that you didn’t always notice when they were up close and personal. Each train had an engine carrying the weight of its life. Some were passenger trains with well stocked dining cars for affluent partying people. Some had cars with large open areas for a scenic nature experience. Others were working trains delivering necessities for survival. Some had a few older cars scarred by memories of the journeys of lost souls seeking a new life. The oldest trains have a lonely last car for looking back to where they’ve been.
There was a time in my early adult life when I had an affluent seemingly perfect life. It was the life my mother wanted but didn’t get. But I wasn’t like my mother, so it was a missed fit. I felt both inadequate and displaced, but didn’t have any idea of a better place. Along the way I had become disillusioned with my religion and since I had unknowingly made a God of my religion, I did not have faith in God to help me.
I felt inadequate and lonely, so I was mostly needy. And need is not only painful, but it is the opposite of love. Pleasure trumps pain, so I found a pain reliever in a party life with lots of alcohol.
Since the brilliant father I had adored had also been an alcoholic, I finally became alarmed by my need for alcohol to make it through the day. I sought help in a counseling group for alcoholics. After about six months, I broke down in a group session tearfully admitting that I felt incapable of loving anyone, even my very kind husband and my four small children. Instead of judging me, the others were not only understanding, but tenderly caring. It was a healing moment.
The next day as I was vacuuming and reliving that moment, I sensed a loving presence with a hand on my shoulder. It occurred to me that it might be Jesus. Then I remembered that I thought Jesus was a delusional dreamer who got himself killed. So, I put that possibility in my mental file of unlikely possibilities. But somehow being not only known and understood but still valued began to free me to focus more on others’ needs, to begin to love.
I also began to search for something that would help me make more sense of life. I read the Scriptures. I even took some introductory courses in some mainstream denominations, but I didn’t learn much about the role Jesus plays in today’s world. I also asked friends who attended churches about some of the miracle stories and the changed lives described in Acts. No one seemed to believe those were part of Christianity anymore. I even attended a Vanderbilt Divinity school course on other World Religions, but the teacher mainly pointed out their negative aspects.
Shortly after this some friends who were living the same affluent party life changed. They not only began to talk about Jesus but decided to go to work full time for Campus Crusade for Christ. It was a non-denominational non-profit ministry. I admit we all thought they’d lost their minds and hoped they had invested in something for their children’s education. But I couldn’t help but envy finding something worth giving up your affluent life-style. A year later the couple came back to town and Judy asked us to have a “Christian Coffee” for our friends where several women would give “witness” talks about the change in their life that came from accepting Jesus as their Savior and Lord. I helped by calling friends and telling them the talks would be short and the food delicious.
The women sharing about changes in their relationships and values did strike a chord in me. But my inner twin to doubting Thomas put that in my “Need More Information” file and I didn’t join in when they led the group saying the prayer accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord. When everyone was hugging and sharing afterward, I started washing the dishes. The woman who led the prayer came up to me and asked if I had said the prayer. I said, “No. I don’t believe in God and though I think Jesus was a really good guy, I think he was delusional.” She didn’t even blink, she just said, “Well, why don’t you say the prayer this way, ‘Jesus, IF you are who you said you were, the Son of God and our Savior, I want you as my Savior and Lord.” Well, I thought about that for a moment and decided it seemed like a win/win situation. If he was, I wouldn’t want to miss out on it. And if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t make any difference. So, I said the prayer that way and then went back to washing dishes. As I washed dishes I wondered how or when I would know. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with an absolute certainty that I was known and loved unconditionally with a love that passed any human understanding. Sheer JOY filled my heart to overflowing. It was mind blowing and life changing. The things I now knew with both mind and heart were that God loves us all. That Jesus came to flesh out that love and teach us His Way to love. I don’t call this being “saved” because that sounded like “finished.” But the kind of love I was experiencing was grace to grow in loving through whatever it took to become the person God created me to be. At eighty-six I am still growing in understanding and in my capacity for loving even the unlovable in me and others. And it’s a stretching process that often means not only seeing the light but feeling the heat.
Saying the prayer is not a magic incantation. It’s a part of a learning process…..some of which I actually did before taking that leap. Admitting the limits of my ability to love and that I was not meant for my lifestyle took a long time. It also took separating God from ALL the teachings of any ONE religion. God is bigger than our religions and though we need their community, we need to always remember that humanity itself isn’t finished yet. No one knows all the truth and nothing but the truth. As long as we DO NOT admit that we will keep disagreeing and fighting and separating and starting new religions. We only have to play the hand we personally are dealt the best we can and that doesn’t require any person or group being perfect/equal to God. Every person has their own time schedule for admitting the many different areas of our own life that need God’s grace and healing to free us. It takes a life time to let go of control and let God be God. I’m still struggling and as long as I am alive I will need prayers for grace. We all will.
Accepting That there are Other Ways of Experiencing and Seeing Life
Two quotes from Wendell Berry the poet, farmer, author, and protestor that resonate for me:
War, he suggests, begins in a failure of acceptance. He writes of exchanging friendly talk with Trump voters at Port Royal’s farm-supply store, a kind of tolerance that is necessary in a small town: “If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher.” Without this, we risk conflagration.
“A properly educated conservative, who has neither approved of abortion nor supported a tax or a regulation, can destroy a mountain or poison a river and sleep like a baby,” he writes. “A well-instructed liberal, who has behaved with the prescribed delicacy toward women and people of color, can consent to the plunder of the land and people of rural America and sleep like a conservative.”
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 