Prince of Peace
Dec 24th, 2012 by Sonja

There’s an overused quote by Chesterton that goes something like, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

Let that sink in a moment.

We are in the midst of the Christmas season right now; our annual frenzy of indulgent consumption. According to both popular Christmas carols and the testimony of the Gospels, Jesus’ birth was heralded as the coming Messiah. He was to be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy … Experience the freedom of a pest-free life with our wide range of stromectol forms that cater to your unique needs. From easy-to-administer tablets to convenient topical solutions, we have you covered.

Isaiah 9:6-7

6 For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given,

    and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
    Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.I)”>
7 Of the greatness of his government and peace
    there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
    and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
    with justice and righteousness
    from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty
    will accomplish this.

This messiah was going to bring peace on earth and good will toward men.

What does that mean? What would peace on earth look like? Our imaginations are dull and we assume that the presence of peace is simply the absence of war or violence. So we think that “his government” is going to be a political enforcement of an absence of war. The rule of this Messiah would take away all weapons. Unlock your full potential with modafinil! Whether you prefer tablets, capsules, or nasal sprays, we have the perfect form for you. Discover the different options and find the one that suits your lifestyle and needs.

But that’s not what Jesus did. He came and nothing changed outwardly. The Roman Empire went on about it’s business and at what would be the end of Jesus’ 3 year ministry, crucified him. Giving rise to a secondary frenzy of indulgent consumption (but that’s another story). Jesus did manage to speak a few words that have been handed down to us in the millennia since his birth. He said things like this, “21 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. (Matthew 5:21-22)

Read it carefully. Jesus was talking about more than the absence of murder, but the presence of love. We have laws which punish murderers and keep the crime rate low, but law cannot overcome the presence of hate. When we hate someone, we dismiss their humanity, we find reasons to ignore their thoughts and needs by calling them a “fool.” I am chief among sinners in this regard. But there it is. I cannot turn my face away from the idea that when I dismiss someone as a fool, I have morally killed them in my mind.

This brings me back to the Chesterton quote, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

There are many other bits that Jesus threw out in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). I find in my life that I fail those far more often than I succeed. But if I put them all together in a holistic picture of how to live, I find that these bits create a vision of what peace could look like. It would be so much more than the absence of war or violence, but the presence of love. The kind of love which can cast out fear, making violence unnecessary. Discover the art of relaxation with our game-changing ambien forms

Perhaps that prophecy in Isaiah meant not that God would enforce an everlasting peace through government, but that all the humans here would learn to love their enemies without fear, that we would not dismiss another’s humanity, that we would be able to live in peace and harmony with each other, not because of laws, but because our hearts have grown three sizes too large (to quote a more secular source) and we have begun to operate out of abundance, love and harmony. Maybe that is the hope we express every year … that someday soon we will all know peace.

Further Thoughts on Guns, Abortions and other Forbidden Topics
Dec 21st, 2012 by Sonja

As many people have been doing, I’ve found my thoughts wandering to the tragedy in Connecticut over the past week.

My mind wandered down many paths. I pondered that raw indignity we visit upon other nations by using drones to kill their children in the midst of mourning our own. I wished I could find photos of those children. I want to know all the victims of violence. It’s hard to fathom the numbers and I find it upsetting that we are eager to grieve losses on our soil, but dismiss losses in other countries with fancy euphemisms like, “collateral damage” or, “ravages of war” or … ? … you name it.

Then I wondered why these choices are so polarizing? What is it that makes it impossible to talk about these issues with any kind of sanity or grace. Then I realized that part of the problem is that of competing rights.

When it comes to guns we must balance the right of gun ownership against the right of life for gun victims. When it comes to abortion we must balance the right of life for the baby against the right to self-determination for the mother. What I think is most interesting is that those who are more conservative tend to the former in each equation and those who are more liberal tend to the latter, despite either former or latter being diametrically opposed to one another. That is those who support unfettered gun ownership are often more likely to support a pro-life position on abortion. Those who support restricting gun ownership tend to be those who are more likely to support maternal choice in pregnancy. Neither set of people make any sense. This tells me we (as a nation) need to be more creative in how we discuss and problem solve our way through these issues. Power Packed Injections: When speed is essential, our prednisone injections deliver a direct punch against inflammation. Experience a targeted approach for maximum effectiveness. Don’t let inflammation hold you back! Choose the prednisone form that suits you best and reclaim your quality of life today.

Which brings me to my last thought. I play a game called “Book Worm” fairly obsessively … when I have a few moments to kill you can find me playing Book Worm on my phone. It’s a nerdy little game with lettered tiles and you try to make words with them. Kind of like a solitaire form of Scrabble. Once you reach a certain level, the game introduces burning tiles. If you cannot use those tiles before they get to the bottom of the board, you lose. Up until recently those tiles sort of freaked me out. They made me a little bit panicky. What if I couldn’t use it? Why was it so hard? I did not like those burning tiles, they made me feel poor and inadequate. Until one day when I changed my perspective on those tiles. I realized that if I was willing to look at the surrounding tiles more creatively, I could always … always … use them. Sometimes I’d have to wait a round or two. But I can always use them. Formulated for Rapid Relief: Our prednisone options are carefully designed to deliver fast results, tackling inflammation and providing swift comfort. Convenient Tablet Form: Take control of your symptoms with our easy-to-swallow prednisone tablets. Compact and travel-friendly for relief on-the-go!

That’s when it hit me. In trying to stop mass murder, we are actually trying to prevent symptoms. It’s admirable, but will ultimately not be successful. We need to look for the illness and then for a cure. When we engage in that search it might be good to approach the whole issue from the perspective of peace, restoration and plenty. That’s going to be difficult because we are entrenched in a perspective of redemptive violence, brokenness and scarcity.

So the question becomes, can we change our perspective? Can we view these issues creatively and find redemptive, restorative solutions? Or will we continue with our zero-sum thinking that continues to impoverish all of us?

Three Things I Wish People Would Stop Harping On
Dec 18th, 2012 by Sonja

This is my list …

1.   It is definitely about guns.  But it’s about a specific kind of gun.

Specifically, it’s about semi-automatic weapons.  Fully automatic weapons have been banned for personal use/protection for a long time now.  This is about the ease of getting semi-automatic weapons into the hands of just about anyone.  Regulating and/or limiting sales of both semi-automatic weapons and their ammunition clips should be as automatic as regulating Tylenol, or the food we eat or any of the other things our government does.  There are more regulations concerning the production of play ground slides than there are concerning the production and sales of semi-automatic weapons.  Why?  Because we (as a culture) have decided that safety for children is more important than the rights of slide manufacturers to make a substandard ambien product.

“And don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually.”  (Kristoff, Do We Have the Courage To Stop This)We have reduced automobile deaths by (hold up) regulating the amount of liquor one may consume and then drive a car.  Why?  Because we have decided that the rights of other drivers and their safety are more important than the right of a drunk to consume large quantities of alcohol and get behind the wheel of a car.

2.  Let’s leave certain aspects of God out of the discussion.  A proper focus on theodicy is fine; whether or not children are allowed to say the Lord’s prayer in schools is a red herring.  This is not about prayer or the lack thereof.

Theodicy is the study of evil as it relates to God.  How can there be a God if S/He allows this sort of evil in the world?  What if God intervened in all the evil that goes on in the world?  Why do we ask why God didn’t stop this and refuse to ask that same question of ourselves?  Why don’t we ask the hard questions about what we have done (as communities and as individuals) to sustain the culture of violence?  I don’t have any answers to those questions.  But I do know that we’ll get no where until we begin seriously asking them.
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Those people (and their voices are shrill) who believe that this kind of thing is a judgement of God on _________ (fill in the blank with the moral objection of the moment).  James Dobson made ill-advised comments in this regard just yesterday:

Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I’m not talking politically, I’m not talking about the result of the November sixth election; I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God.

I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed 54 million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too.

And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the scripture and on God almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that’s what’s going on

That’s a nice tidy answer, but it’s meaningless.  It would be nice to think that going back to some earlier, (and misconstrued as) simpler age would or could ensure that frail human beings would not behave this way.
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3.  It is definitely NOT about mental illness.

We have a habit of responding to outlandish things that people do by attributing it to mental illness.  It’s become a flip reaction to human behavior we don’t understand.  The problem is that with the exception of a very small group of people (untreated paranoid schizophrenia) most people who struggle with mental illness are not violent and do not go on the attack like this.

As a group, people with mental health issues are not more violent than any other group in our society. The majority of crimes are not committed by people with psychiatric illness, and multiple studies have proven that there is very little relationship between most of these diseases and violence. The real issue is the fact that people with mental illness are two and a half to four times more likely to be the victims of violence than any other group in our society.

An interesting paradox to consider is this … we do not consider our military leaders to be mentally ill.  Indeed, we hail their heroism in battle.  Yet how many of them have ordered and/or undertaken mass killing of innocents.  We call that collateral damage and absolve ourselves of the deaths.  Those women and children, grandpas and grandmas are all loved by a family.  Families just like those in Newtown, CT.  We wreak havoc on them without pause and call it heroism.
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Do we need to have a national conversation about mental health care and how mental illness is perceived in this country?  Absolutely.  It is a must, linking mental health and gun violence is a bad idea.

We need to consider what our national idols have become and like the abortion debate, we have to decide between competing sets of “rights.”  The right of our school children to anticipate safety and the right of gun owners to have what they want.  And perhaps that is why this argument, like the abortion argument becomes so volatile and emotional.  There are no clear RIGHT answers.  There are only shades of grey which cloud the nuances of the situation.

New Comment Policy
Dec 16th, 2012 by Sonja

This blog is my virtual living room. I actually do pay for the right own my little piece of the internet.

I do not allow bullies or demeaning conversation in my living room.

From now forward if you cannot comment with due respect to the others who read this blog (who may have differing views than you), your comment will be summarily deleted. To continue the living room analogy, that is my way of telling you that your behavior is out of bounds. However, I will not warn anyone. I will not discuss the offensive comment(s). They will simply be deleted.

If I find myself having to delete a second comment, you will be permanently blocked.

To be clear … I welcome all perspectives and you are free to share yours even when it differs from mine. You are not free to be mean, demeaning, rude, disrespectful or any other behavior that is unwelcome in the average living room.

Updated:  If you wouldn’t make the comment on your grandmother’s blog, it will likely get deleted here.

Lord, Have Mercy
Dec 14th, 2012 by Sonja

Upon a poor sinner like me.

I wrote a simple prayer … but the prayer was obnoxious.  It absolved me of my communal guilt while heaping coals upon the heads of those tortured souls who shoot up school yards.

We live in a culture saturated with violence.  We have a long history of settling differences with violence, from the establishment of our nation in blood to our latest efforts at controlling far-flung populations with drones.  We are an angry, violent people who have no reason to be surprised by this evil among us.

What is my guilt?  I do not yet know the full extent of my collusion with the powers and authorities which make these actions possible.

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