Spiritside

Merry ?????? Part 2

The headline read:  Boston "Holiday Tree Stirs Religious Controversy.  Good.  It should.  I don't want to rant and rave here about the deconstruction of Christmas.  All I want to say it that I would never force my Jewish friends to call a Menorah a candle stick.  I would never ask someone who celebrates Kwanzaa not to do so in front of my family, and I'm so scared by the fact that each year we have to defend our rights to have Christmas and call it Christmas to the point of legal action taken against schools for allowing the kids to say "Merry Christmas" as they pass in the halls. 

My late husband was from Boston and it was a second home for us for a long while.  This is no rub on the people there.  Boston is an amazing city and I enjoyed my Christmas's spent there.  I enjoyed sharing it with my children.  Call it a "holiday tree" if it makes you feel better, but does anyone really buy into that?  Does anyone think an evergreen decorated magically this time of year is about anything other than Christmas?  I know many who don't believe in Christ who still embrace these traditions.  They still use the terms and celebrate the season.  Maybe some day the Christmas story will be the thing that opens ones heart to the true reason we celebrate.  But not if we do away with it.  Jesus Christ came into this world and those of us who believe in His birth have every right to celebrate it, as we have for so many years, without being sued over it. 

Reverse racism.  That's what this whole thing makes me think of.  We're allowed to be persecuted for our beliefs, but aren't allowed to defend ourselves.  It's no compromise of anything except ones principles to call a Christmas tree anything other than a Christmas tree.  We still have over twenty five more shopping days till Christmas.  I wonder what the next news story is going to be.

Merry ??????

I can't take it, I can't take it, I can't take it!!!!

How is saying "Merry Christmas" to someone at school as you pass them in the hall proselytizing?   How is singing a Christmas song doing devotions?  What is happening here?  How far are we going to go to make the world secular?   And why oh why when we spend so  much time and energy on removing God from every aspect of our children's lives are we surprised when teenagers have sex, do and deal drugs and worse, kill their classmates, teachers, parents and the parents of their girlfriends?  Doesn't anybody see the connection? 

Every year is worse.  Every holiday season there is some person who finds some reason to sue an institution or person for having the nerve to use religious words when referring to a religious holiday.  Now we can't celebrate Christmas, we want school vacations for the holiday season removed from school calendars, we don't want our children wishing others Merry Christmas.  Those who are making such a big deal about this could truly better our world if they used that energy toward promoting causes that benefit others rather than spending their energy using the birth of Christ as an excuse to show their own feelings about Him.  We have religious freedoms in this country.  Those who say they are acting on behalf of those freedoms are fooling themselves if they think that by not allowing those who believe in Christ to say so is protection.  I'm all for equal time.  Give all the holidays equal billing, but do not stand before me taking away my daughter's right to say "Merry Christmas" and tell me it's for the protection of her rights.  The hypocrisy makes me ill.  My children go to a Christian school for this reason.  How can someone honestly think that by outlawing religion they are protecting our rights to religious freedom?  Does it offend someone whose not having a birthday on Tuesday to say "Happy Birthday" to someone who is? 

All I know is somewhere someone needs to start recognizing the connection between fighting so hard to remove God from our children's lives and the current state of affairs with these kids.

My Heart, a Black Hole, or Missing Lenny Soooooo Much

There are days.  This is one of them.  I miss him.  I miss his smile, his laugh, the mole over his left eye.  He had very broad shoulders, and I miss rubbing them for him after a long bike ride.

I miss his kindness.  His words always edifying.  I miss hearing him with our daughters.  The knowledge that no one will or could ever love those girls the way he did breaks my heart.  I mean, there are no alternatives.  There is a helplessness to this loss for them.  As a mommy all I want is to make things right for them and not being able to change this drives me slowly insane. 

I have been depressed for a few weeks now.  I act at times like I don't know why, but always, always at the bottom of my emotions is the nagging sense of loss.  I can't assimilate it into my life.  I know at some point I should be able to, that's what "healthy" grief does, but four year later I still just miss him.

A Really Good Sunday

You know when you just hear one of those messages that makes you resonate with joy because the truth of what is being said finally makes something ungraspable graspable?  That was me on Sunday.  I've been doing this Bible study about believing God.  Believing what He says about us, His children, Himself, His power, His word, and I discovered that I approached His truths the way I do everything else.  With skepticism.  It seems to good to be true that we can speak and move mountains simply because we believe.  Or that He loves us, loves me, enough to die.  That I am forgiven, redeemed, accepted, adopted.  Who else in my life has demonstrated any of that?  My mom drank herself out of life and I don't know my father.  My husband of thirteen years but partner and best friend for twenty is dead. 

While preaching on Abram on Sunday our Pastor brought up some points that I've known for years, but heard with a believing  heart and spirit changed something inside of me.  God gave clear directive to Abram, yet in his humanity his trust was limited to his fear, and so for fifteen years he was not where he was supposed to be.  Yet did God forsake him?  Did God's love for him falter?  Abram entered Egypt, allegorically the "world". and while there allowed his circumstances to cause him to doubt and fear.  His fear then distorted the truth.  The only way Abram got back on track was to return to the place, the alter, where God had revealed Himself.  Once he called upon the name of the Lord his distortions became clear visions of what he was to do.  Did he obey completely?  Those who know the story know that he did not.  He was to leave everyone, but took Lot.  Even so, God loved Him, God used him, and God blessed him. 

I have heard this story from the pulpit many times, but never before with the focus being from God's point of view.  Held up as an example, Abram's story has been used to demonstrate the consequences for disobedience, or partial obedience.  But for the first time I saw the amazing love of God in Abram's flawed faith.  And I believed.