Life

RAGE!

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Okay, I normally stay away from two things when I blog: Politics and outright reprimands.

But I’ve had it!

This is not about Judge Kavnaugh, though that whole mess is partly what got me to thinking about this, but also what I’ve been reading about in my Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric book. It has a whole chapter devoted to how we justify our own bad ways of thinking.

The whole book has a liberal slant, but its not wrong.

But  my problem is not just with politics, but with how we as a culture and as a people are handling conflict. And I mean this is extremely personal, because I find it in myself. I see it in the people around me. Slapped on slogans, broadcasted over talk radio, and good gracious the  news network! For crying out loud, it’s even in our superhero movies and teen dramas.

That thing can be put into one word: Rage.

“Oh, it’s well beyond rage”–William Wallace, Braveheart.

Just take a minute and think about it, what word would you use to describe the way people talk about each other? The way they talk about policies?

What I hear and feel when I see the news is rage.

It’s mindless too. And I’ll admit my own political party is nearly as bad as the Left (clearly we’re not rioting and sending death threats.) I am disgusted by Conservatives who spend all their time blasting the left. While I wholeheartedly believe the left is wrong, and I can’t help but think they act abominably as a whole, even if as individuals I know plenty of decent liberals, but I have never felt the appropriate response was to return in kind.

Pointing fingers is not helpful, maybe we’re right, maybe we’re not, but playing the  blame game will not leave anyone innocent. In fact, it’s stupid for human beings to play this with each other.

It’s like how Adam and Eve pointed fingers in the Garden, both of them did wrong, did it help to blame others? We can argue for hours on who was more guilty, but it won’t change the past.

We can’t change the past.

I’ll tell you one thing, if tomorrow every democrat I knew of had a change of heart and started doing the right thing and standing up for the truth, then it wouldn’t matter to me what the party had done in the past. I don’t freaking care what the Clintons did, or Obama, because it’s in the past. What I care about is the future, if democrats were doing what I honestly thought was best, then I would vote for them.

My identity is not in my political party name, it’s in my morals. Conservatism lines up with what I believe in, that doesn’t mean conservatives always do things I like. I don’t support the party because I like all the people in it, but because I think the bad ones do less damage, and the good ones do more good overall.

Fixing the politics in this country would take a number of miracles, and both the left and the right are holding us back. I’m not ashamed for my party’s ideals, but I’m ashamed of the way we uphold them,

Rage is a virus. It’s contagious. And it’s all about returning in kind. The Left has been awful to the Right, no mistake, but being awful back…this bickering, name calling, mocking, and whining…I consider it beneath us.

Look, I’ll get frustrated with liberals just as much as the next conservative, but I do not hate them. I don’t consider them all to be the worst of humanity. (Some yes, but you’ll find those in every party.) I may get mad at what they do, but I do not want to let myself be consumed by rage every day. It has to be exhausting to do a talk show on politics.

Now, I know there would be protests here. Some would argue that conservatives have to be more aggressive because we own so little of the networks. True enough. I’m not against showing initiative. But, if we’re really as better at politics and morals as we claim, then we shouldn’t have to stoop to yelling and verbal jabs. Or generalizations.

What are we so mad about anyway? That evil exists? That in our mind it’s represented by the opposition? That people can be liars, thieves, abusers, backstabbers, accept bribes, and be unbelievably biased (the ironic thing here is that for some of you I just described my own party.) Did it surprise anyone? Why is that making us angry?

The Bible says not to fret over evildoers, and to not give way to wrath or let anger consume us because it only leads to harm.

I challenge you, whether you’re right or left, to take a long hard look at how your party acts toward the opposition. Ask yourself, is that how I believe people should be treated?

I admit, no. There, I said it.

I especially implore you college students and teens, many of you are liberal, and it’s easy for young people to feel anger over causes (I ought to know, I am one.) But, is this the legacy you want to leave? Rage? Ten years from now, will you be glad of what you did out of rage, or what you did out of mercy?

I’m not letting conservative young people off the hook, how cruel can we be to the others? What kinds of things do we call them on social media.

If there’s one thing I do agree with liberals on, it’s that human rights include not being disrespected and then having it justified because of prejudice. But that goes for them too. If you believe racism is wrong, stop labeling everyone who disagrees with you a racist…because that’s still being bigoted. Does that make you better than us?

Conservatives, stop accusing liberals of destroying the country. We’re all doing it. It’s not just them. And it’s not really the wisest way to change their minds either.

Lastly, everyone for your own sanity and relationship’s sake, please, for the love of all things holy, let go of your rage. It’s blinding us all to the truth. Blame is a waste of time. It doesn’t matter. At the very least, Christians should be comforted by the thought that God will judge in the end who is to blame. He won’t play favorites.

Until next time–Natasha.

We don’t understand Death.

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My cheerful topic of discussion in class yesterday was Death. What is it? Why do we avoid it?

I’m starting to think the curriculum was designed to hit close to home for me since I’ve lost some people recently and been pondering the subject of death. As I wrote about in my last post I am a fan of Resurrection.

However if we go by what my classmates seemed to think, it doesn’t look like most people see much sense it the idea of resurrection. Many people embrace the idea that death is the end, and we should just accept that.

Everywhere from real deaths to fictional ones, I find this. Some folks are still holding out for their favorite character to come back to life, the soul crushing response by some other fans? “They’re dead and gone, deal with it.”

Well, ouch.

Seriously, is that really the most sensitive thing to say? Don’t stomp on my hopes.

Characters dying never bothered me too much as a kid, usually they were the evil characters. Of course I didn’t like Obi Wan Ken-obi, but then he comes back. And it’s sad in other stories too. Not a lot of examples come to mind. There’s Beth from Little Women, but I stayed away from sad books as a kid.

As for real life, I’ve only known four people who’ve died. Known them well. I remember my first brush with losing someone was a nice woman at my church who died. I didn’t know her very well, I just remember her always smiling at me. My mom told me she went to heaven. I believed it, and I still do, so I wasn’t bothered.

However since then the people I’ve lost have all been ambiguous at best, I’m not sure if they went to heaven. A few I really doubt.

It’s the worst part of being a christian, having to believe that not everyone gets to live happily ever after, and worse, that they could have if they’d opened their hearts. Rejecting God is a choice.

Yet Death is one of the things that makes it hardest to accept God. Especially a loving God. Though we all intellectually know death happens and the world goes on, when it happens to us it’s still a fresh shock. We are suddenly unsure f ourselves, and that makes us unsure of what we believe. This doesn’t happen to everyone. Some people handle death with peace. But they are the exception, not the rule. Most of us are left feeling uncertain. Some never recover from that, most of us do, but we never feel the same.

That’s not to say we are the worse for it. Death, like other ills, is a matter of how you handle it. It can make you stronger or weaker.

In my class my teacher brought up the idea found in some poetry on the subject, that love ends with death. There is no love between the dead and us. We love them, but it’s not a living, growing thing.

I’m not sure that’s true. Many people continued to feel connected to their dead family or friends. I don’t really myself, except at certain moments. The interesting thing about love is that it preserves your memory and therefore a little bit of yourself. When you’re gone, you’re not entirely, if someone loves you. A part of you, not your own consciousness, but your memory, stays with them.

It’s something science hasn’t been able to explain. Loving our lost ones is not biologically helpful to most people. yet we still do.

I am not sure that the dead no longer love. I believe that those who go to heaven love even more, but from afar. We can’t hang onto them, because they have no need of us anymore.

Most of grief isn’t really coming to terms with the dead, but with yourself. Asking how you can deal with this, how you can go on. Some decide hey can’t, but that’s not the right choice.

I think because we’ve removed the comfort of religion and core values, death has become too much for many people. Now  they have nothing to make it seem less terrible.

And the answer most come to is “We don’t know.”

There is no faith in saying “I don’t know.”

I’ll admit, I don’t know what happens to every person everywhere who dies. OR even to the ones I know. That’s my uncertainty, and that’s my grief. Not knowing.

But what I do know that I know that I know, is that Jesus is real. And that he is love. And though God does things I don’t understand, there’s a reason He holds the keys to life and death. I  know that I’m alive now in a way I never was before knowing Him. I know that He changes lives. I know that He enables people to die with courage.

You might wonder, why does God let people die at all if He really conquered death? The Bible says in 1 Corinthians that Death will be the last enemy to be overthrown at the end of time.  Why is this?

A couple of reasons might present themselves. If we never died our bodies would be pretty useless. At old age, death is a mercy if you will be transformed.

More than that, if death was overthrown now, all the evil people in the world would never die either. Can you imagine that?

Even more than that, God wants us to trust Him with our lives. It’s what sets us apart form nonbelievers. If we didn’t die, there would be no need of trusting Him.

We are promised the fruit of the tree of life when the new heaven and new earth are made. We will be eternal then, in fact we already are, in our spirits.

That sounds nutty to many people. The things of God are foolishness to the world. What else would you expect?

My conclusion: Either I believe the Bible, or I believe nothing…and that doesn’t seem to work out too well.

Until next time–Natasha.

A word to the wise.

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Homo sapiens. Or homo sapien sapien. Do you know that that means wise man? Or wise wise man.

Do we seem wise to you? I see a lot of cynicism about that fact around me. No matter what political party or social group people are in, they don’t think we’re particularly wise.

Wisdom seems to be an elusive quality for man. Or woman if you want political correctness. Maybe that’s why its’ actually been an occupation to be a wise men. We call them scientists now, but back int he day, they were more like oracles of gods, or philosophers. People who had a special insight into the things of life who could advise kings or villages, depending on their status.

Some of us are lucky enough to still know people with that kind of reputation. But it’s scarce now isn’t it?

I think what made it scarce isn’t that wise people don’t still walk the earth, it’s that we stopped looking for them.

I don’t wish to harp on about how this generation is the worst. frankly, form what I’ve read, that’s what every previous generation says about the next one. And each of them are both right and wrong.

Mankind tends to destruction, and that does continue to worsen almost every generation. But the same follies and foibles are always present in mankind, whether as a whole or not we’re at a more enlightened state. And those have been short lived.

I realize I sound kind of defeatist, but I’m not really. I just have little faith in man’s ability to be true and virtuous without divine intervention.

Wisdom, if we read Proverbs, is one of the most important parts of being a righteous man or woman. Without wisdom, we have not the wit to do any good thing, except by instinct. And that only carries you so far. It’s no shock that every culture has its own set of sayings and fables meant to teach wisdom to the simple. Usually to children. Kids can be wiser than adults.

Proverbs 8 describes wisdom as crying out in the streets, and stnading on a high place, and at the city gates, imploring the sons of man to listen to her.

While the city gates were traditionally where the wise men of town would sit to solve problems and give advice, and a high place is symbolic for divine perspective, crying out in the streets can just mean an announcement. It’s not necessarily a dignified position. It was like doing a broadcast is today.

Wisdom thus puts herself in the expected place, the more divine place, and the place of anyone wanting to get some news across. Whatever works. The point is, Wisdom is everywhere, and it’s trying to get your attention.

I think of my college classes here. Whether or not my professors are wise is up for debate, but that we learn from wiser sources is pretty much a given. Wisdom also doesn’t come form the wise ,sometimes, like in the movie Forrest Gump, wisdom can come out of the mouth of the most innocent and simple minded people.

Wisdom might be found on social media, if you can dig it up. Wisdom can certainly be found in churches still, if people have open ears. It can be found in relatives. In friends. In what you read. In what you listen to. If it’s the right sources.

And a good way to tell is also provided in Proverbs 8. You’ll know wisdom by what it supports. Wisdom claims to love life, to hate deceit, to hate strife, Wisdom’s delight was in the sons of man, Wisdom is creative, Wisdom means to save live, not waste it. If something in your life encourages all that, it probably has wisdom in it.

If that sounded like the opposite of the things in your life…careful.

Being willing to hear wisdom is the first step toward getting it. All you have to do is look. That’s where the saying “A word out to the wise” comes from.

That’s all for now–Natasha.

What really matters.

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Well it’s been quite the week for me. On Sunday my grandpa passed away. Now this weekend is his funeral.

I  never knew that loss felt cold before. But it does. I felt cold after I heard the news. I’d expected it for a while, he was not doing well right before. He hadn’t been doing well for a decade. Especially the past four years or so. In fact, that he lived as long a he did was a mystery to his doctors, and my family’s opinion, it was a miracle. He lived off prayer, so many people prayed for him.

The show I mentioned before, RWBY, has a song about loss titled “Cold.” It’s pretty sad. And pretty accurate. When someone dies, do you cease to love them? No.

To me it’s more like a connection was lost. Like your spiritual cellphone now is out of service. But I know some people don’t feel that way. They still feel connected to people they’ve lost. I’m not sure why that is. Losing people has not made me an expert on it. C. S. Lewis wrote about feeling his wife’s nearness in “A Grief Observed.” He knew she still continued to exist.

Some folk think you can talk to the dead and they’ll hear you. I don’t think that, but I understand the need to have final words. So few of us get to be with loved ones when they pass on. I felt like if I had had the chance, I would ahve felt better. Though I did get to see him the very day before, so that was a mercy.

I don’t have a lot of very close memories with my grandpa, he had such ill health, and lived too far away, and he was not very good at connecting with people. But I did get to go out with him on his boat once, which was fun. And he took us around museums and a fishing expo once. I think we went to an aquarium once also. Before his health got really bad. He also paid for my braces, so I owe the fact that I have good teeth now to him.

He was always kind to me. As I got older I found out he was not perfect. None of my grandparents are of course. But I always chose to think of him more as how he was to me. His best self. I prefer to see people that way.

I notice that families like to dredge up old stuff. And I’ve been there, and I’m getting really disillusioned with it. It’s such a waste of time, as my grandmother liked to say. We all do dumb things when we’re young and immature. I’m fortunate to have realized this now and not when I’m 80.

What really counts, as a couple of good songs I know “It happens in a blink” and “Give a little love”, both point out, is not the dumb things we’ve done, but the things we did to love other people. The Bible says that some of us will do little, some of us will do none, and some of us will do much. The parable of the Talents, or when Paul speaks of our works being tested by fire. The point really isn’t how much we do, but that we do things out of love.

Whatever else anyone could say of my grandpa (and all of us could have plenty of things said of us that we wouldn’t like, couldn’t we?) he did love me and his other grandkids and he did things for us that we couldn’t pay him back for. He did help out my parents when we were down on our finances. He did try to take care of my grandmother. And that’s what we’ll remember more about him, or at least that’s what I want to dwell on. No human being is perfect, if we focus on our mistakes, that’s all we’ll ever see. If we focus on the things we did right, at least there is love.

 

 

 

Until next time–Natasha.

Vacation and Compromise.

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Wow, you guys are awesome. My first post in days and you gave me like 8 views plus five other posts.

I haven’t really talked about my vacation, and I should post some pictures once I can get them onto my computer, but for now I’ll just say it was pretty good.

I won’t call it the best experience I’ve ever had. There was too much driving and drama for that, but I got to visit a lot of cool places, including the Grand Canyon. Which is beautiful. It’s huge too. I know you know that already, but until you see it you just don’t comprehend its grandeur.

Yellowstone was cool too, I got to see little baby bison, and some elk grazing on bushes, and even a Mama bear and her cubs.

The best thing was getting to see family I usually see two days out of a year and actually learn to know them better, and to meet family I hadn’t even known about before. Also I made a new friend who I’m staying in touch with.

Family Vacations are something that’ll make you either love your family or hate them. We got to see the good and bad of each other. I don’t know how my sisters put up with being jammed int eh back seat with me for nearly 14 hours. And with my parents when I drove. Things like music priveledges are points of contention.

You’ve probably heard that it’s wise to learn how to compromise. Or to quote Captain America/ Peggy Carter “Compromise where you can,”

Do you know I’m starting to wonder if people know how to compromise anymore. Have you ever walked away from a conversation feeling like the other person just passive aggressively told you it was okay, when it really wasn’t. They give you that “I’d argue further if I cared enough about what we were doing” feeling. Or they say “Do what you want.” Which means pretty much the same thing.

It’s a problem with younger people especially, not knowing how to tackle something out. To give a little, to take a little. I have the same problem myself, but I’m trying to get better at compromise.

My definition of compromise is not give up what you want, but be willing to take only part of it, and give the other person part of what they want.

But compromise has different levels. Sometimes it can mean you do what someone else wants more than what you want. Say both of you want to do different activities on an outing, but you have limited time. You could relinquish doing what you want more than once or twice, and let them do more of what they want, in the name of peace.

Or you could compromise by splitting what you want into separate days or times.

But if you truly just relinquish your will to the other person, I call that a surrender. We need to know how to do that too. But in a way that doesn’t make the other person feel bad.

I’ve never been the best at this, but some people can surrender without you even realizing they did it.

Anyway, I don’t have much more to say about this, except that if you’re going to have a family, you better learn to compromise, in the name of peace.  Just a word to the wise.

Until next time–Natasha.

Pure Love and the human condition.

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Hi, sorry I’ve neglected you guys. I was not feeling good this week and I had a lot of homework to catch up on. Thankfully my books arrived!

I’ve had the time, however, to get hooked on a new show, it’s called RWBY. I don’t often say this about anime anything, but I recommend it a lot, though it is not finished yet, and if you watch, be prepared to wait a few years for the conclusion because each season takes about a year to come out.

But two seasons was enough to sell me on it, season 3 ripped my heart out, and seasons 4 and 5 continued to blow my mind. Season 6 comes out next month.

A little summary before I get to my real point: RWBY is basically a superhero team set in a fantasy world with heavy spiritual undertones. Or even overtones sometimes. It features a host of likable, deep, smart, and none cliche heroes who you actually want to imitate though you wouldn’t want to be them per sec because they have problems. Not petty issues, but actual life challenges. I’m pretty sure this show is aimed at older teens. The show features villains who you will utterly despise even though their motivations are explained to you, which is a plus in my book since I never liked sympathizing with evil characters. They are not two dimensional, but the show makes it very clear they are evil and you do not want to be like them.

But that’s enough about the show. What I really want to talk about is the contrast between the show’s view of human nature, and the one I’m getting in my Critical Thinking Class. I don’t know who picked my curriculum, but it’s been the most depressing stuff I’ve read in a long time. and I just read Fahrenheit 451. Each short story or novella has featured the theme of human nature, I guess it’s the point we’re focusing on for these weeks.

According to these authors, human beings are cruel, unfeeling, ungrateful, willing to abandon loved ones as soon as they become an inconvenience, and on the brink of insanity constantly.

I know some cynical person might look at that list and say “That sounds about right.” Yeah, that person might not like what I’m going to say.

THIS IS WRONG! WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

I won’t name all my sources here because I think you’re better off not reading them, but the highlights are a story about a man turning into a cockroach and becoming a monster to his family; a woman killing her boyfriend and committing necrophilia; a man with a mentally disturbed employee who starves himself to death after becoming a nuisance to everyone around him; and a man who removes his wife’s one blemish because he can’t bear imperfection and kills her by doing so.

Now if all those sound like something you’d never want to read, be glad you aren’t required to for the course. I actually enjoyed a chapter about straight logic more than I enjoyed any of those.

I do come up with dramatic things when I write my fiction, but I stick mainly to what I’ve seen on TV, or what I observes in the spiritual way of things. You could argue the case for all the above stories having spiritual connotations, but they aren’t ones worth being talked about.

The Bible says of the corrupt that it is shameful to even speak of the things which they do in secret. I don’t think it means that you never expose wickedness. But you should be really careful what you talk about just for the sake of conversation or discussion. No one should bring up the darkest parts of humanity for table talk.

By contrast, RWBY, unlike all the stories I read, has the bad and good sides of people both. It’s most notable example is Pyrrha Nikos, who is hands down one of the best characters I ever saw on a show. Pyrrha demonstrates something that I have seen in stories I’ve read by C. S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, and Francis Burnette (A little Princess and The Secret Garden.) Stories like Heidi, The Enchanted April, The Bronze Bow, Anne of Green Gables, or even comics like Mr. Miracle and Spiderman, all contain exceptional people. People who, as George MacDonald would say, demonstrate “the common good uncommonly developed.” It’s my rule of thumb that if you find no true love in a story, then you find no truth. You’ll never separate those two things with any degree of honesty. You have to search for that one character or theme that demonstrates love, pure love.

Pure Love is an ideal for human beings. While it is possible for us to have it, it takes much growth and much sacrifice on our part. It is true that few of us are willing to undergo that kind of suffering. I could describe Pure Love as a concept, but I prefer using characters. Characters work better than real people in this case because unless you’re fortunate enough to know someone like them, most of us haven’t met anyone who exudes that kind of love all the time. A character is someone all of us could potentially see and hopefully understand.

Pyrrha Nikos struck me because I could never catch her doing anything selfish, no matter what scene she was in. All she ever seems to want is to connect with people and help them. I have seen a few characters like that, but they got ruined in the end by irresponsible writing. Surely I am not the only one tired of show writers growing cynical about their own characters and dooming them by violating the characters own convictions for the sake of the plot…ick.

The point is Pyrrha and the others stand up for what is right and don’t want to just stand by and let bad things happen. And I believe there are people like that in the world.

You probably won’t find them on TV all that much because unfortunately, the reason these stories are on my curriculum is because as a culture we have turned to the dark and the depressing, the antihero and the straight up bad guy. Our world is sick. But, that does not mean we do not have the healers in it. I don’t know anyone who always radiates love except Jesus, but I do know I want to be that person. I have a long way to go. But because I believe God transforms us, I believe I can get there.

The short stories made me feel like garbage, selfish scum of the earth, and that was not based in any reality or likelihood that I would do what the people in the stories did. I can honestly say I wouldn’t. But these stories don’t make me sit back and ponder my life choices as much as they make me think “people suck, at least the ones who wrote this trash did.”

RWBY shocked me with it’s real look at what it’s like to be in a war against evil, but that shock made me remember values I’ve been forgetting for some time now. And it made me want to live up to them again. A part of me was beginning to think having pure love was impossible, but I was reminded that I sure as heck should keep trying anyway.

It’s a pretty pass when an internet show has a better grasp of reality than literature in a Critical Thinking Class, but one cannot disregard humble messengers. Oddly enough, people who expect to be taken seriously the least can often put out the most worthwhile material, because who do they have to impress?

I guess my closing thought is, surround yourself not with what seems the most hard look at life, but with the one that strengthens your values and makes you want to be a better person. That’s the stuff worth engaging in.

Until next time–Natasha.