The Blame Game

Happy Sunday!  It’s a beautiful sunny day here in the resort town of Cobourg. I enjoyed the church service up at St. George’s this morning and we had some visitors, who don’t make it to Gores Landing very often and one of the lovely ladies actually bought a set of my books.  That’s four sets that I have sold at the church! And, I’m happy to say that the reviews are great.  I’m thrilled that they like the books.

I have a rather testy subject today, and if you follow my blogs, you will know that I don’t often tackle controversial topics, but this is likely one.  I have been bothered by the whole neo-nazi thing raising it’s ugly head.  I thought we won that war it is was all over and everyone was going to play nice and get along.  I am always the eternal optimist.

It seems that we still have groups out there that think they are better than anyone else.  This is where the blame game comes in.  If I’m not mistaken, some of what they are saying, now and back in the Hitler days, is that these ‘nasty Jews’ (please excuse these thoughts as they are not mine) are taking our jobs. These ‘nasty Jews’ are infiltrating our communities. And it goes on and on.

My goodness, can we not just all get along?  Every person has their merits, their strengths and weaknesses. We all have those things that we are good at and things we are not so good at.  That is even what our commerce systems are based on.  Move the call centres to areas in the world that are good at it and let us do what we are good at.

We have no right to blame others for our situation.  That’s too easy.  I can easily try to get sympathy because someone else got the job I wanted, but if they were the better choice, that was the right thing to do.  Now, I do take issue with the tokenism thing.  The idea that for stats, we need a certain number of minorities. I may have even been someone who, unknowingly, benefited from it. I was a single, disabled, mother.  Great for stats, but I don’t believe that I was ever treated differently because of it.  I was working for the same company when I was healthy and married, as I was when I became a single mother, and then disabled with MS.

What makes me really laugh at this though, is that these neo-nazis are sending their spit in the mail and finding out that they are not totally white.  Isn’t that a hoot!  My husband who’s sister-in-law teased about being a pasty, white Irish guy, has Ashkenazi Jew in his heritage, we discovered.  I have eastern asian in me--Iran, Iraq, Israel.

Remember, Jesus was a Jew, he wasn’t Christian, how could he be? Christianity didn’t exist before him and he certainly wasn’t white.  Mohammed wasn’t a Muslim, Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. Think about it people.  It all had to start somewhere.

Instead of hating, look at all of the major religions, what do they all preach?  Love!  Love thy neighbor. Put your hand out there to hold another’s. We can be nothing but stronger together.

Forget the blame game. We can only blame ourselves if we hate, but we can be much stronger if we love each other and support each other.  We can make this happen.  Do not divide, unite!

All right, off the soap box. As you can probably tell, this stuff frustrates the heck out of me.  I like to see the good in people.  It is in everyone, I’m sure.

So, go out there and look for that good in people and it will surely make you feel better.  God bless all!

Church

Happy Sunday! I figured that a good time to get working on the blog was when Cavan was working on the ribs in the smoker.  I just need to toss together the coleslaw and voila, dinner!  I love it!

So, church. I make no secret of the fact that I am a believer in God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, etc.  After all, I’m a priest, who was raised in the Anglican church and despite lack of attendance at various periods of my life, I never stopped believing.  It just seemed that other things got in the way and I’m afraid that truthfully, laziness was the primary reason.

These days, if I’m in town, I head up to St. George’s Anglican Church in Gores Landing for Sunday service.  It’s only about 20 minutes away and it’s a lovely old church, with a wonderful group of parishioners who have been very welcoming.  I was hoping to preach a bit, but since I was not ordained in the Anglican church, I may only do readings.  I’m okay with that, although I am hoping to win them over, one day.

Just this week, I came across two quotes about church that I would like to share, because they made me think:

“The church is a hospital and not a courtroom, for souls.  She does not condemn on behalf of sins, but grants remission of sins.”  St. John Chrysostom

“The mark of a great church is not how many come but how many people live differently as a result of being there.” Unknown

Both of these quotes speak to me. The first because I have always believed that we are not here to judge, that is the job of someone much greater than us.  The second because I have also always believed that we attend church to get something out of it--some ideas of how to be better people.  Those ideas need to be actioned.

So, essentially, I attend church expecting to be given two main things:  forgiveness for my sins and some ideas on how to live a better life, not only for myself, but how to help others live a better life. These two thoughts are also influencing my thoughts on sermons.  I have discovered that I really like to write and deliver homilies. When I was in training, I learned that there are usually four parts to a sermon: 1. Trouble then, 2. Grace then, 3. Trouble now, 4. Grace now. These parts can be woven together nicely and not necessarily presented in that order, and I think that a really good preacher can do that fairly seamlessly.

I am thinking, however, that you need to go one step further and actually give your congregation something actionable. My sermons often end with something like ‘How will you serve Christ this week?’. But perhaps I need to be more specific and give them some ideas on how to do that. I need to make them understand that they are forgiven for their sins and that they can do better, with some guidance.  They need some guidance on how to avoid the trouble entirely and to take it one step further, not only avoid the trouble, but help someone else avoid the trouble, or at least somehow let someone else know they are not alone.

I’m still pretty new at this and truly, I think you never stop learning how to reach people. I will continue to learn and grow, and hopefully over time, continue to improve the messages that I share and how I share them.

I’ll keep looking for better and better messages and better ways to present them.  May you find better and better ways to do what you do too!  God bless!

Memory

Happy Monday!  It’s what we call a civic holiday up here in Canada.  In the province of Ontario, it is called Simcoe Day, in honor of John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, and the man who initiated the abolishment of slavery in Canada. Truthfully, most folks don’t care what the day is as long as it is a day off.  Those of us who are retired, don’t often remember what day of the week it is, much less what the holiday name is, unless, of course it is Christmas and I love Christmas!

Today’s blog is about memory, or perhaps more fittingly, the lack of it. This was prompted by the fact that I couldn’t remember what I was going to blog about. I know that I had an idea for something very profound (I’m sure it was!), but it got lost somewhere in the grey matter, called my brain.  I could, and often do, blame the MS--it’s nice to  have a convenient excuse for such things.

I may have another excuse, which I hope doesn’t show up too soon, or if I am truly blessed, will not show up at all.  Cavan and I sent our spit in the mail to 23andme and got all kinds of information back.  For both of us, it mentioned a high probability of Alzheimer's. Not too terribly surprising for Cavan, as his mother suffers from it and his paternal grandmother also suffered from it.  So, he has it on both sides of his family.  For me, I am adopted, so it was not a surprise, but besides a high probability of celiac, it was the only red flag.

Well, I guess the flags are really only yellow, as with probability you never really know if you will get it or if you will dodge that bullet. Celiac is probably a certainty for me.  I have known for years that I feel much better if I avoid wheat. I told my doctor that because I am not in agony, it is hard to convince myself to avoid it for the rest of my life.  I was actually surprised by the range and severity of symptoms when I read up on it, and I have a few of the symptoms, but fortunately, none are really severe.  I will go back to avoiding wheat for a while, though, as I would like to feel better.

Going back to the memory thing.  I know that if something is not on my calendar, I will definitely not remember it, but as I discovered last week, if it is on my calendar and I don’t check my calendar, I will also not remember it! Cavan is the same, so we actually share calendars (Google is amazing for that!), so that we know where each other needs to be and we can properly schedule appointments to make sure that nothing overlaps and we don’t get double booked.  This is especially important when you need to drive, as we are down to one car.  This works most of the time, although there have been a few times when one of us has had to walk, take a taxi, or hop on the Cobourg bus.  I have taken to coloring events on my calendar yellow if I need the car (which is really just when I need to drive into the city).

As with my MS symptoms, you just need to adapt.  You learn a different way of doing things. I have lots of sticky notes and keep whatever I can online so that I can find it. My phone is my life, because of that.  All phone numbers are stored on my phone, although it is linked to my Google account so that they are shared back and forth between the phone and my Google account, and that gives me backup. I think I need to start writing down ideas for blogs, though!

Anyway, things are good and manageable for now, for both of us.  Eventually, we joke that we may get to needing only one book and one DVD movie to watch, as we won’t remember how either ends! We have a little trouble with that now, but we still try to keep up with various TV series and go to the movies occasionally and I like to read a lot. I don’t think I will really get concerned until we start getting lost in our neighborhood. With prayers, perhaps we will never get to that point.

Prayers for all of your challenges!  God bless!