God – Revvin' it Up

Why I’m Still a Christian

Well. The Christian faith in America… the progressives and the Conservatives. Currently, there are more Conservatives in government and their faith is sometimes on display.

For example:

-selling a Bible with your name on it for profit.

-stating that White Nationalists (who are frequently very Conservative Christians) who believe there are good people among those committed to racism so much that they would travel and gather and run over and kill someone. And chanting “Jews will not replace us.”

-stating that you agree with, believe in, and enjoy an interpretation of scripture that turns women into baby making machines, without a voice, or rights, or anything.

There’s lots of talk about deconstructing your faith. I honesty don’t understand that process very much but I do know what an Examen is. And I did write a substantial paper called a Credo 20+ years ago. I know what I believe on paper, specifically, having studied, prayed, and discerned. I know that I am a panentheist, for example.

But these are just details. Details like those listed in our Creeds. There is so much of the Creeds that I dislike. The Apostle’s Creed was developed by men, more than 1500 years ago, when they were trying to make the main points about what it means to be a Christian.

The thing is, I believe in Jesus. Not because of historical proof but because of my own experience with him. The Creeds say absolutely nothing about what Jesus taught. They don’t say that when he was asked, he said the Greatest Commandment was to love God and love your neighbor. He didn’t say believe in the “virgin birth”, “resurrection from the dead”, blah blah.

I want to say that I no longer associate with the word “Christian” but so many would not understand my meaning. I want to explain that I am a follower of Jesus. I believe what he commanded.

And he didn’t command that we post the 10 Commandments in public schools. A Texas congressman just made very good points in argument with the woman who was pushing the bill. He pointed out how Congress doesn’t even follow them.

A Congress of mostly white men with money who are devout followers of a man that doesn’t know Alaska in a US state.

I’ll keep praying to Jesus. It’s the only way we can survive this time.

Amen?

The Monarch, the Checkbook & James Taylor

Sometimes I buy into superstitious things: avoid stepping on cracks, don’t walk under ladders, black cats in general and the killer? Break a mirror:

I’m refusing the entire idea of 7 years bad luck. Nope. When that happened, the A/C went out.

Oh no.

I called for repairs and prayed a lot. For this moment, I could get it cooler for just shy what I had of emergency funds. But I had just enough and the house is cooling off.

The guys who got the A/C kicking took the box of broken mirror pieces I picked up but could not lift.

I went outside and what did I see? A monarch butterfly moving with the breeze. That happens so rarely now but it was big and beautiful and it made me smile.

When I came back inside, James Taylor was singing “You’ve Got a Friend” on the radio. (If you didn’t know, I’m JT’s biggest fan.)

I heard it differently this time. JT wasn’t singing about his being a friend. The song reminds me of someone who once sent me a card that only read “winter, spring, summer or fall”- the next line is “all you’ve got to do is call”. He didn’t put that and he didn’t show up. I was going to a funeral & didn’t need another gut punch.

So the song reminds me of my love of JT. However, on the wings of the monarch and under a cooling house, I heard the song as if God were singing it. I heartedly recommend doing that.

My friend. Yes. That’s why I haven’t ditched the whole religion. Because he has come to me, I believe. Plain and simple.

And today God sang to me.

Fight-Flight-Freeze

I was taught our autonomic nervous systems handle our flight or flight response to threats. So many people are talking about stress management. Our bodies are responding to the stress even if, in our minds, we are not at all stressed.

Not long ago I learned that there is an additional response to flight/flight. And that is “freeze”. Becoming immobile. I can relate to that, too.

However, after 62 years on this planet, I think I may have learned a thing or two, albeit the hard way, most of the time.

When I was forced to look at the state of my physical health, like going to see a doctor and having to get on the scale I’ve avoided, I had the usual stress responses.

I fought. I fought hard. I fought everything and anything. I fought you because I didn’t like me. I fought me because, if I didn’t like you, I dang sure didn’t like me. I fought because like is a battle to win, isn’t it?

Flight. Oh, I can fly far, far away. I am the queen of denial, as they say. I fly off to dark shadowy places where I can feel sorry for myself, play the victim, and redouble my efforts at building walls to protect myself.

Did I “freeze”? Of course. I was stuck, or I thought I was anyway. Immobilized. Unable to move forward or back, right to left, left to right.

I successfully utilized fight, fight and freeze in avoiding my stress and not being a responsible adult with my life. I was in a perpetual loop; if I tried to change, fight, flight, or freeze would swoop in and hold me back, as if to say, “You’re never getting out of this”.

Then I discovered another word. I had seen I had that option but I really didn’t want to get out of my stress loop. I was accustomed to fighting, or flying or freezing when given anything that stressed me out. I knew what that felt like and what to expect. Eventually, however, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results is the definition of insanity!

So… my new word? It’ really two. FACE IT. Stop trying to avoid it. Face it.

I had to accept that my choice of wings with blue cheese dressing was a poor decision. I had to accept that binge eating had been a coping skill that was killing me. I had to open my eyes to the new dose of blood pressure meds and the underlying fear of type two diabetes. I had to FACE IT.

Face the fact that the food industry doesn’t care about making me healthy, they care about me purchasing more. Face the fact that if I really want something, I can put on my big girl panties and make a change.

I faced the fact that I was destroying my body and always had been. I faced the fact that I had so much more pain and inflammation. I never got enough sleep. I was fueled by anxiety and fear.

You know what? You can change it. Face it. Stop running, stop avoiding, stop denying. Face it. Would you treat the person you loved the most in this world the way you are treating yourself?

An out of popularity AA slogan is “surrender to win”. That’s exactly what I did. I surrendered. My way was going to kill me. My way was going to perpetuate poor health.

It was time to face it.

It feels good. Not all the time, but most of the time, my pain is less, my confidence is vastly different, I’ve exchanged hope with the weariness I had been feeling. This is MY life. My God-given life. God gave me this body and it is good!

Life can be so much better.

I invite you to join me on this journey. But only if you’re ready.

Peace.

Living to Die

Living to Die, Dying to Live

I remember when my best friend’s big brother was killed in an accident. The whole town grieved. I remember, very clearly, telling God how loved this guy was, the world needed him back, so please take me and bring him back. I later had a dream that cleared things up for me, but this was the first time I really thought death was better than life.

I grew up in a home with a dad and his weak heart. We were told, quite strictly, to not upset him. Therefore, nothing emotional, as a general rule, was ever discussed, at any length, as I was growing up. I knew he could die any minute, although at the age of five, I was pretty unclear on what that meant.

At some point as a teenager I decided that eternity with God was a whole lot better than to trudge the road here on earth. In the depths of my own-of-control and poorly managed depression, I was often suicidal – not in a “I’m going to jump off this bridge” sort of way, but basically the belief that I’d be better off far, far away, long gone from this earth.

I had no respect for my body. In fact, I hated it a lot. I hated being female, because I saw how we were treated like fragile china plates. I also knew that being female made me vulnerable to sexual abuse. I was all too familiar with that.

At the age of 20, I went to the Air Force recruiter and asked about signing up. My dad had died about a month before my inquiry. They told me I had to lose 15 lbs, I think. At the time I did not feel I was overweight, just that I hated my body and didn’t care for it one iota. Obviously, I never lost the weight, not then anyway.

My untreated depression came to a head when my childhood trauma began to come back to me in flashbacks and body memories. Boy, did my hatred for my body increase then! I was tried on all the different ones, plus mood stabilizers, tranquillizers, benzos, you name it. And another ten pounds would be on the scale.

I have to stop and interject that before and after this time, I was determined to NOT take care of my body in the hopes that it would give out and I could die. I continued to smoke and drink and eat whatever. I didn’t care. This life sucked anyway, what did it matter?

Ok, back to the story. So I met with the shrink in seminary and got lots and lots of meds. After three years, gaining about 40 pounds, I developed a blood clot in my leg which gave me a lot of nerve damage there, and pain. I was on a walker. I was in my internship and thought God had done a cruel joke in calling me into ministry.

I graduated from seminary as a size 24. When I started I had been a 14-16. My leg was painful and numb at the same time, I didn’t know what I was doing, and off I went to be a fulltime pastor. The walls frequently felt they were falling in. I would have a brief reprieve from the depression and feel hopeful, but then crash down again.

My first suicide attempt was in 1979. I didn’t find the right combination of medication and have my depression under control until 2014 or so.

I still hated my body. In addition to the weight, signs of aging were beginning and I also started having chronic pain. Now medicated with opiates, I fought with the same 20 lbs back and forth, hating every inch of me, feeling like a train wreck if I had to see a doctor and they had to see my medical history.

Then I saw a Facebook post from an old friend and how she had lost 70 lbs in eight months. I figured it was all Ozempic. I thought I would ask her about it. And then I became an Optavist.

It hasn’t been three months yet and I’ve almost lost 30 lbs. I’ve gone from a size 20-22W to a 16-18 W, which are loose. I feel GOOD. My pain is greatly decreased. Seeing the pounds come off, I have a great attitude. I want to be with God, yes, but I don’t have to die for that to happen. My aging body continues to grow and change because I am alive!

I am so grateful for this change. I’m so grateful God isn’t done with me yet, that God’s plans for me obviously include living longer and that’s okay. I want to help people not only in the faith walk, but in changing how they feel about their bodies because it will change their lives.

My word to guide me in 2025 is surrender. An old expression from AA used to be “Surrender to Win” and I am winning, y’all. I hope you are, too.

Bedlam

“…God has disposed us with a mushroom shaped cloud …. someone will set the bomb off, and we will all be blown away…”

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Our family sang songs in the car on trips, especially vacations, but I believe we were a little unusual in that we sang a few that were not the usual …

Sweet Rosie O’Grady, she was a blacksmith by birth …
Just a Bowl of Butterbeans…
Three itty fishes and a momma fishy too…
In the Boarding House Where I Lived….
We Live for You, We Die for You, National Embalming School…

There was another song, that is vaguely remembered from a cassette tape recorded by my dad, a couple of his sisters and their husbands, on a trip he took back home a few months before his sudden death, 34 years ago this month. If I could remember it now, it would be a great history lesson, almost as good as Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.

It talked about how the French hate the Germans, the Irish hate the Scots, etc and ended with a line similar to the one I began with “…and we will all be blown away”, followed by a whistle of the sound of a bomb dropping from the skies. It was written post WWII, obviously, and wasn’t one of the more popular Baumgartner tunes, but I listened to the tape, and in the decade following my dad’s death, spent a good deal of time with his little sister (almost a carbon copy – they looked like twins). We sat around playing canasta, with bourbon and coke flowing freely, & sang & drank & smoked & played all night. It was the ‘80s. We were in the middle of the Cold War, and discussions of nuclear weapons were popping up like dandelions around families and churches and social clubs. The US spent (at least) billions of dollars on a bomb that would stop their bomb before it could reach us, and although it failed in every test back then, we poured billions and billions more into it, seemingly with endless funds and voter support.

All along though, the US had enough nuclear war heads to blow up the entire planet several times over. “My stockpile is bigger than your stockpile…” was the US/Soviet dialogue.

How things have changed.

Looking back to those days, no one and no-thing could stop the power of the US with the backing of Ronald Reagan. We were the shining city on the hill, where the poor dreamed of a better life and sought to make their way here. We didn’t fear them. Unless they were Communists, of course. Even then we opened our arms to those who sought political asylum from the Soviet Union in the US, many talented and brilliant people who sought freedom and teetered over the tight wire of Communism, oppression, and poverty to beg for our protection. We granted them the sanctuary to house them and keep them safe from their enemy states. (Hmmm, whatever happened to doing that, say, for Syrians?)

Even though I’m a Democrat, I respected all the Presidents, regardless of political party, because they were OUR Presidents. While I became President-elect of the College Democrats following the Mondale/Ferraro attempt to win the White House in 1984 and got to attend wine and cheese parties at Speaker Jim Wright’s home in Fort Worth, I have to grant respect to Reagan (aka the Great Communicator) for coming to a nuclear agreement with the Soviet Union. My side was wanting an elimination of nuclear warheads and even nuclear power plants but that was not to be. But it seemed that by the end of the Cold War, the US/Soviet relations had agreed to disagree. It would have been incomprehensible for Reagan to have had the covert spies or friends of Gorbachev have photo ops in the Oval Office, or would Reagan or Bush or Nixon, for that matter, ever considered the Soviet leaders as people to be admired.

Had there been a question of Russian involvement even giving Mondale a couple of electoral votes in that pitiful Presidential election of 1984, I would bank on Ronald Reagan making a speech and endorsing a full fledged investigation into any interference in our American democratic process. Any American President would, until now.

Half of the Democratic Presidents of my lifetime had mistresses who were either accepted or hated by the media, except Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter; and Jimmy Carter actually acknowledged his sin of “lust in his heart” to Playboy magazine and everyone was aghast that such a thing could be said. JFK had numerous women at his disposal, Bill Clinton did, too. We thought THOSE issues were scandalous?

What has happened? Where did our education of civics, our understanding of American history and our diplomacy go?

Try as I might, I can’t understand this phenomenon of Trump believers. I think it is because they do believe in something of Trump that does not equate with patriotism. Trump himself seems clueless as to how the three branches of government work. I have friends who think that presidents are elected for 8 year terms. Many believe that individual states already have power that outweighs Supreme Court decisions or can manipulate the Court’s decisions to fit their culture. (Look at what’s happened to sanctuary cities, abortion rights, and gay marriage).

Now we have the “good old boys” who have been the backbone of the American south (in my exposure anyway) with whom I shared classes with in all of the schools I attended, who have begun this vitriol over Blue Lives Matter and the Confederate Flag being a symbol of southern history (it was an uprising and we lost …hello????). The NRA has become the 4th Reich; “buy a gun, get one free for the sociopath of your choice”. And coworkers who supported Trump have said to me it was “that transgender thing … the queers … that’s just not Christian” or, more popular still was “I just can’t vote for Hillary Clinton.”

What has happened, America? That sick feeling I had the night of the Presidential election and the days following did not go away; they have been stretched out from having a political flu, to a short remission with the Women’s March, back down to a relapse in the face of White Nationalists organizing in Charlottesville …. which wouldn’t trouble me as much but the swastikas, the white robes and the TORCHES? Seriously, TORCHES?? What the hell? Are these born again cavemen or Klansmen? It’s hard to differentiate.

Here I Stand.

But I cannot finish with the words of John Wesley, “So be it”.

Hey God: What? How? When? Why?

Siri defines “bedlam” as “a scene of uproar and confusion”.

I define God as the great “I AM” and the Creator.

Please, God, re-create us in your image and grant us wisdom to relieve our confusion.

AMEN+

My Mother the Whale

My re-creation of meditation

My Mother the Whale

At some desperate time in my life, another one when I felt alone and needing something to fill the void; I was befriended or I’d guess, absorbed by another similar blob & I learned from it. It took decades but I learned this very important lesson; how to commune with one of the most giant mothers of our world. It has grown and changed and transformed over the years But it begins like this:

I am alone on a beach on a gray fall day

I lie back on the sand; it’s not hot; it’s a little cool. I am alone. The tide is rolling in and as I hear this sound come and go, I also let it fill and empty my lungs. Sometimes there are are images I allow to flee from me but usually I focus on my breath. Tide in, breath in. Tide out, breath out. It takes some time to slow it down that much lest I hyperventilate or imagine a tsunami.

When my breathing and the sounds of the tide are in sync, I let the tide roll further and further in, so that it is first at my feet, but getting closer and closer to my head at a steady pace. By the time I fear the salt water in my face, I am relaxed enough to sink further into the sand, and also into the sea just beneath the surface of the sand.

It is there, deep down in the bottom of the ocean that I am initially blinded by the brightness of the white sand on the bottom. As I move around, I see the sand moves too and this feels relaxing and playful. It’s around this time that I remember I’m under water.

It is in just that moment, my mother, the humpback whale, lifts me up to the surface to take a breath of air; which will last me another 15 minutes of total self absorption and play.

I relax deeper and my trust increases. I realize that this magnificent aircraft carrier protecting me overhead from exposure – and danger – is my mother, the humpback. She refers to me only as her “dear one” and we play, she lifts me up for a breath and when I come to rely to on her to do so, she sees that I find my own way.

We have time together, this enormous creature, just the two of us, before we have to journey back north because her life’s purpose has basically been fulfilled.

It’s not an atonement, it’s not a ritual in any of those ways, but she has been genetically programmed to stay behind the herd, eat more, birth me and then escort me back to the northern pacific.

The “cute” orca out there? the killer whales? Kill. They try to get between my mother and me so they can hold me down long enough to suffocate me. The outloud cries and torment of her wanting to stop and “give up” struggle deeply with her recognition that she has to move on or risk dying herself; her life’s purpose stolen in a flash. I can see similar expressions with humans when a loved one dies.

But those thoughts usually flow right on through the water of which I am made; the water of which most of us are created from and filled with; ashes and ashes and dust to dust; why not sand to sand?

Faith has been compared to floating. If you fight, you’ll drown. If you relax, your journey can be magnificent.

My mother the humpback pushes her giant nose under me to lift me to breathe, she journeys right beside me, always watchful for those “cute” orcas who only want my eyes. She protects me. She leads me down an instinctual path that she knows but cannot map out. I know to trust her, without having had therapy with her. She births me. And each day of our journey, she saves me by forcing me to breathe (especially when I am busy at play and want to whine, ”but mom“) and she remains watchful for the enemy.

The ancient Hebrews, they say, were slow in asking directions and thus wandered the desert 40 years. The didn’t wander into the wrong place. They just took a long time getting there because it took THEM a long time to be prepared for where they were going.

My mother the humpback is like that, too. I have no idea if she’s leading me to slaughter, day care or eternal freedom. I only know that she will not leave me except in the case of her death and that if she dies before our journey is complete, most likely, I also will die.

My mother is a humpback whale. I don’t know her name or the name she has given me. But I would recognize her singing anywhere.