|
A Few Words from Pastor Bryan...
...and Nadia Bolz-Weber
Andra Moran led our Morning Devotion group today and shared this wonderful message written my Nadia Bolz-Weber. It feels so relevant and helpful at this moment in our history that I wanted the rest of you to have it. It's long enough so I won't write much myself this week. Except to say that...
Nadia wrote this piece on August 17, 2021!
Also, I attended a wonderful continuing education conference last weekend in Los Angeles. My heart goes out to everyone impacted by the devastating fires that just ravaged the L.A. area, and I join in lamenting all the tragic losses and the destruction done by the fires and their ominous connection to climate change. BUT--the way these fires were covered in our media, I was surprised to be able to get to L.A. at all. I was surprised the conference was held. And I was quite surprised that I did not see one trace of evidence or impact from the fires at all, and I moved around several parts of the city. Again, I'm not in any way minimizing the damage done. It was and is very real. Catastrophic. But the way the media covered and presented the fires I suspected the entire city (or at least the surrounding areas) to be pretty much up in flames. It was not.
My point is simply that we need to understand that we are constantly being sold "bad news." The worse it is, the better it sells. I heard someone recently refer to CNN as "Constantly Negative News." So "amen" to everything Nadia writes below, and let's help each other choose to NOT overstate the negative aspects of reality. Oh we don't want to understate them either. There's an avalanche of stuff being thrown at us now and some very disturbing things happening to put it mildly. But the "powers that be" want us all to feel overwhelmed and fearful and powerless so that we will shut down and disengage. That is a strategy and a tactic.
The disturbing aspects of Reality are "real" enough for us all to deal with these days. Let's not embellish them. Let's not make any bigger than they actually are. Let's not give those who want us to be fearful and intimidated and overwhelmed the power to control our own minds, moods, hearts, and actions. Let's not forget to notice and celebrate all the beauty and goodness and Love in this world. And let's be vessels through which all the good stuff can flow and be shared more now than ever.
See you in church soon I hope,
Pastor Bryan
Nadia Bolz-Weber
If you can't take in anymore, there's a reason
I used to live in a very old apartment building with super sketchy electrical wiring. Were I to audaciously assume my hair drier could run while my stereo was on, I would once again find myself opening the grey metal circuit breaker box next to the refrigerator and flipping the breaker. My apartment had been built at a time when there were no electric hair driers, and the system shut down when modernity asked too much of it.
I think of that circuit breaker box often these days, because friends, I just do not think our psyches were developed to hold, feel and respond to everything coming at them right now; every tragedy, injustice, sorrow and natural disaster happening to every human across the entire planet, in real time every minute of every day. The human heart and spirit were developed to be able to hold, feel and respond to any tragedy, injustice, sorrow or natural disaster that was happening IN OUR VILLAGE.
So my emotional circuit breaker keeps overloading because the hardware was built for an older time.
And yet, when I check social media it feels like there are voices saying “if you aren’t talking about, doing something about, performatively posting about ___(fill in the blank)___then you are an irredeemably callous, priviledged, bigot who IS PART OF THE PROBLEM” and when I am someone who does actually care about human suffering and injustice (someone who feels every picture I see, and story I read) it leaves me feeling like absolute s#*t. I am left with wondering: am I doing enough, sacrificing enough, giving enough, saying enough about all the horrible things right now to think of myself as a good person and subsequently silence the accusing voice in my head? No. The answer is always no. No I am not. Nor could I. Because no matter what I do the goal of “enough” is just as far as when I started. And yet doing nothing is hardly the answer.
So I wanted to share something with you. Every day of my life I ask myself three discernment questions I learned from one of my teachers, Suzanne Stabile:
What’s MINE to do, and what’s NOT mine to do?
What’s MINE to say and what’s NOT mine to say?
And the third one is harder:
What’s MINE to care about and what’s NOT mine to care about?
To be clear – that is not to say that it is not worthy to be cared about by SOMEONE, only that my effectiveness in the world cannot extend to every worthy to be cared about event and situation. It’s not an issue of values, it’s an issue of MATH.
So I try and remember, 1. We are still living through a global pandemic (and now its aftermath) and that means the baseline of anxiety and grief is higher than ever and shared by everyone. 2. The world is on fire literally and metaphorically. But 3. I only have so much water in my bucket to help with the fires. The more exposure I have to the fires I have NO WATER to fight, the more likely I am to get so burned, and inhale so much smoke that I cannot help anymore with the fires close enough to fight once my bucket is full again.
So I try and tell myself that It’s ok to focus on one fire.
It’s ok to do what is YOURS to do. Say what’s yours to say. Care about what’s yours to care about.
That’s enough.
If immigration reform is yours to do, if it is the fire you have water to throw on, (thank you! and…) that is enough. There will be voices saying “but what about climate change? You don’t care that the planet is dying??”. Tune that s*#t out. I mean, you could turn around and ask the environmentalist next door why they heartlessly don’t care about immigrants, but there is no percentage in that. Instead, we could be so grateful for the people who are called to work on and respond to worthy issues that are not fires we ourselves are equipped to put out.
I’m not saying we should put our heads in the sand, I’m saying that if your circuits are overwhelmed there’s a reason and the reason isn’t because you are heartless, it’s because there is not a human heart on this planet that can bear all of what is happening right now. So thank you for being a person who cares about and responds to animals, or the environment, or immigration, or domestic violence or any of the other worthy-to-be-cared-about s*#t-shows we are in the midst of right now. Just, thank you.
| 
