Tag Archives: Bible

A Mirror Darkly?

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After working the voting precinct last week, I’m still processing. But one thing that’s coming up over and over again, is how much people around me espouse a God who looks like them. Acts like them. Believes what they believe.

Not that they believe what God believes. Their God believes what they do. Their God has opinions on weaknesses, in particular, that don’t align with the New Testament Jesus. You only have to read the New Testament once to understand, God has been redesigned. And to my, well, frightened eyes, he sounds in their mouths like an angry white guy.

This freaks me out, because at first it made me feel superior; I was on the right side of God! Our God is an Awesome God, a Mighty God, a God we seek to know. To Know God and make God known -I am doing it correctly!

And then I started to drill down in my own life, what I believed about God, what God wanted from me, what I was meant to be doing…..

….and it sure looked a lot like what I wanted to do. Like what made me comfortable. Like what benefited me. Like everyone else should think like me, understand God with the depth that I do.

My God is ethnocentric? Help us, Jesus. God in the hands of angry sinners is a terrible thing to contemplate.

So these days my prayer is, Jesus, help me interpret what I’m seeing in front of me the way you want me to. You gave us all personalities, you say in the Bible that some are hands and some are ears (and that means at least one of us has to be the liver). So okay, we have to be who you formed us to be and we see the world through the eyes you gave us.

But dear Jesus, please don’t let me reform you into who I decided I needed you to be, rather than who you are. That’s going to be way more important soon. This is going to get ugly. Don’t let me believe in the angry white guy God, and please don’t let me redesign God into a tree hugger who thinks everyone could benefit from a warm chocolate chip cookie, either. I’m listening, carefully, and with a lot more humility now. Help, please. Thank you.

New Year’s Resolutions —

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Writer Wendy’s weekly blog

New Year Resolutions
We all make them. We all break them. I’m not sure I take them all that seriously anymore, but I do have a list of goals for 2024.

  1. Set up the still. We have a sorta jumbled collection of what we think is most of the equipment in one of our outbuildings. This is the year we try making that bundle of tubes and barrels and little metal thingies into a working machine. Outside town limits, of course.
  2. Befriend a crow, maybe? This one is speculative, but gee, it looks like fun. The crows bring
    people pretty presents, and they seem to be excellent conversationalists. Plus, maybe they’d keep that effing chicken hawk away…..
  3. Say the eff word less in casual conversation; save it for important moments. This one might be hard because I’ve been binge watching Succession. (IYKYK) Still, I would like to maximize the impact of my selected f-bomb moments by making them more, well, selective.
  4. Make some new friends. As we age, we all know that making new friends is weirder, perhaps even harder. A widowed friend took up salsa dancing in an effort to meet people, and now she’s beating back male attention with a stick. A divorced friend joined the women’s club, a do-gooding society that raises money by baking stuff and selling it and then spending the money to buy more stuff for baking, etc. They’re also really good at feeding homeless people and holding the government accountable for not taking care of homeless people. Sorta like librarians, the Wytheville women’s club. Do not eff with them; they will eff you up with soft pillows and sweet treats and kind words so that you will not realize until you cannot get a loan at the bank or a seat at the coffee shop that you have been well and truly EFFED around town. They do their best work undercover. I’m not a good dancer, so I joined the women’s club. Since then I’ve met a lot of nice homeless kids with the same sad slide of small situations tumbling together to form disaster in their lives. Homelessness is made up of a bunch of tangled circumstances coupled with one piece of bad luck or timing. But hey, in a small town, bad luck is bad karma which somehow became a Christian concept known as “not working hard enough.” Never have figured that one out, but we laugh about it a lot at the women’s club, between making box meals and crocheting hats for the homeless kids.
  5. Do not fall for the “God is mean” trick making the rounds. Read Matthew 20 once a week or so (that’s the one where everyone gets paid the same for working the vineyard, even though some worked all day and some worked less than half the day). Cruelty is not listed as a fruit of the spirit; preying on the weak is not Biblical. I will ignore the growing Gordian knot of White supremacy mixed with “God only loves those who (insert X here)” mixed with abortion is God’s most important cause, and thus “we all know that means God loves straight white men more” lunacy flowing from so many spigots these days. Imma read the Bible and stay out of the extrabiblical literature zone. And I’ve always been good at staying away from men preaching a Jesus who has their exact personality. They’re easy to spot.

    So no, not too many resolutions really. Now, where to meet crows….?