Category Archives: Political

An Approach to Decision Making

Mar 4

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I’ve taken a lot of classes that included processes for decision making. Several things have stuck with me in spite of my unreliable memory.
Perhaps the most important one is that we each have natural tools/gifts, but they are only part of what is needed for an effective problem solving process. Effective problem solving not only needs a team approach, it requires recognition of the equal importance of diverse gifts.

First, it needs a vision of the long term goal, not just the quick fix.

Second, it needs brainstorming that includes all possibilities, even seemingly “pie in the sky” ones.

Third, each possibility will have a down side. So, list and evaluate the down sides. Eliminate the ones with downsides that you feel you cannot live with.

Fourth, look at the practical problems needing solving for each possibility and generate reasonable solutions.

Fifth, Now re-evaluate, in terms of (a) personal values, (b) downsides, (c) actual resources, those possibilities that ended up having reasonable solutions for problems. Then make your choice, or if a group decision is needed, come to consensus.

Note: For believers in Jesus Christ as the perfect human expression of God’s love for all, this process would involve both communal and personal prayer for guidance at the beginning, at any conflict points or questionable areas, and at the final decision making point, and would include evaluations throughout in the light of the values fleshed out in the life and death of Jesus.

Posted in Answered Prayer, B4Peace, Decision Making, Political, Prayer, relationships, Spiritual, Teaching/Learning Experiences

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Smart or Intelligent? Moral or Ethical? Religious or Spiritual?

Sep 17

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11:27am
Being smart and being intelligent are different in practice. Being smart is more about the present moment and the practical, being intelligent is about learning from the past, so humanity can live both free and humanely in the future.

Morals and ethics are different also. Morals are about not doing evil, while ethics are about not achieving reasonable goals evilly. Morals are immediate and personal. Ethics are long term and social.

Ethics question whether an end, particularly the goal of our personal happiness,  justifies means that hurt people and that set precedents for corrupting society.

In trying to pass down values for a changing world, I want to challenge my descendants:

1. Morals: Don’t do it if you don’t want those you care about to read it on the front page or see it on U-tube.

2. Ethics:  Don’t do it if everyone else also doing it will make the world less humane and not a place you would want your grandchildren or loved ones to have to survive.

Obviously we need both smart people and intelligent people.  We also need moral people and ethical people.

Unfortunately, the smart and the intelligent, like the moral and the ethical, often end up politically opposed to one another. Neither realizing that  issues aren’t either /or.  Instead, what is needed is serious dialogue in order to find a balance in the tension of opposites.

But that kind of openness requires spirituality, not religion.  And spirituality is very expensive personally. Spirituality is on a whole other level than morality or ethics or religion.  It’s about becoming and being, not doing or achieving.

It’s described in Matthew 5: 3-11       I am paraphrasing:

Graced are the poor in spirit for they can be open to God. (When not filled with self importance, we have room for God within.)

Graced are those that accept the pain of loss for they will find the Comforter within. (Sorrow, not escape, leads to the Spirit.)

Graced are those who do not need to own or have power over anything for the joy of everything is theirs. (Then we are free to window shop the world, enjoying its beauty and other people’s joy.)

Graced are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for Jesus will come and abide in them.( When we recognize our own unworthiness,  we can accept Jesus as our righteousness)

Graced are those who recognize the log in their own eye, for they will know how unconditionally God loves them.( And then we can love the unloveable.)

Graced are those focused on God, for then we see Him everywhere.

Graced are the peacemakers because no cause, nation, or person owns them,  then we belong only to God.

Graced are those persecuted for Jesus’ sake, for we know Jesus.

Graced are the falsely accused and rejected, for then we are free to please only God.

Spirituality is foreign to us, because it is paradoxical and few of us have had any training in grasping paradox.

We’re faced with having to lose to win and having to die to live.  And that takes grace more than smarts or intelligence,

and it takes grace more even than morals or ethics.   And opening to grace takes admitting we need it.  That’s the leap of faith that jump starts our spiritual journey.

God of the Universe, we are yours, take us and give us the grace to become the people you created us to be. We cannot do it on our own.  Give us the righteousness of Jesus, so we will know the depth and breadth of your love, and fill us with Your Spirit to guide us on our journey back home to you. Amen

Posted in Addictions, B4Peace, Ethics, Forgiveness, Healing, Love, Personality, Political, relationships, Spiritual, Suffering

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Peacemaker Ministries

Aug 25

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I wrote recently about our women’s group starting a new class on conflict resolution. I’m very excited about this opportunity, but I do realize what a challenge this will be. So, I’m praying for our group and our facilitators, and ask my fellow B4Peace bloggers to pray also.

The book we are using to begin is Resolving Everyday Conflict by Ken Sande and Kevin Johnson.

I have only read the introduction so far, but it has captured my imagination and revived some of my long lost hope about peacemaking.

Ken Sande says that since he became a full-time Christian conciliator in 1982 he has seen these peacemaking principles used to stop divorces, restore friendships, reunite churches, settle lawsuits, and even bring peace between warring tribes in Africa and Asia.

I’m looking forward to seeing what can bring about those kinds of reconciliations and peace.

He also says to learn more about Peacemaker Ministries’ resources, training, or services visit http://www.Peacemaker.net.

I feel like I am standing at a door to a whole new way of life, perhaps even a deeper sense of purpose.

Don’t you love those moments in life?

My discovering the wonders of blogging last year at seventy-five is continuing to open new worlds to explore at seventy-six.

Thank yous to: our nephew David who gave me my first computer seventeen years ago, our son Thomas who is our computer tech, Tracy who introduced me to blogging last year, and the bloggers around the world that keep me inspired, particularly Kozo and the group, B4Peace.

They have all taught me that it’s never too late to learn new, exciting, and life changing things.

Posted in B4Peace, Gifts of Age, Political, relationships, Spiritual, Teaching/Learning Experiences

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Keeping Children Safe from the Insane and the Insane Safe from Themselves

Mar 27

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When I first heard about the horrifying massacre of young children in Connecticut, my response was that I should buy an Uzzi and volunteer to guard the nearest school any of my grandchildren attended. Realizing that I have grands and great-grands in six counties and three states, I decided to start a movement to arm grandparents as guards in the schools of America. When I calmed down a little, reality reared its ugly head. Mental pictures of me (and those like me) forgetting how to get the safety latch off or shooting the maintenance person, because the glare from a window behind him made the mop look like a rifle, squelched that idea.
I’ve followed the responses and proposals in the media and on the internet and thought a lot about violence and counter-measures, that I’ve witnessed in my seventy-five years.
I don’t have statistics to compare the amount of violence in the decades since I first experienced it personally in 1954 (See post: My Introduction to Violence), but I remember the Kent State student shootings by the National Guard, innocent young black children killed over integration, a father shooting five or six elementary school children on the school playground in my neighborhood in Houston in 1959, The Texas University sniper killing students from its Campanile, and of course the killing of the children in the preschool in the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. If there seem to be more of these now, perhaps it’s partly because of increasing population, partly because of the impersonal anonymous climate of larger and larger institutions, and partly because we don’t imprison the mentally ill in insane asylums any more, but haven’t found a viable alternative for those who are a danger to themselves and others.
But with the killers being students, parents, outsiders, extremists, and even the National Guard, it appears to me that while we certainly have to try to make our schools safer, there really isn’t any way to prevent an insane homicidal/suicidal child or adult from killing groups of children. Groups of children are vulnerable in the school, on the play ground, going from building to building between classes, on school buses, waiting to load onto school buses. They are vulnerable at Science Museums, Chucky Cheeses, Disney Land, Park playgrounds, Zoos, Skating Rinks, Little League games, school sporting events.
Several thoughts confuse the issue of gun control. The guns that killed in these cases were not in the hands of known criminals. And some were ordinary guns, not repeating rapid-fire guns, and then some were bombs. And just about anybody that can read, can make a bomb today.
The problem calls for more than just arming personnel in schools or curtailing the sale of certain types of guns or turning school buildings into bunkers.
My concern is not just the tools of violence, but the hatred that fuels it, a hatred that now comes out in elections, in sports, in marriages, and even in the name of religion. What is the source or catalyst for so much hatred?
To find that answer, we can only begin by looking within.

Posted in B4Peace, Gifts of Age, Parenting, Political, Spiritual

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Healing: Mind, Body, and Soul

Feb 27

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I don’t think any of us are intentionally evil, but we are all blind. When Jesus prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” he meant all of us. When Paul said, “We see through the glass darkly,” he meant all of us, including himself.
Without grace there is no way we can get beyond our limited perceptions. We are molded and even warped by our historical era, culture, climate, nationality, race, class, religion, education, genes, ancestors, parents, peers, personalities, bodies, health, and life experiences. We are all crippled and incomplete spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Only by dying to these limits, to our earthbound selves, can we become free to see, and then to love, as Jesus did. Since many of these influences are rooted in our unconscious, it takes times facing our demons in the desert to even begin to know ourselves and times spent in prayer on the mountain with God to be set free mentally and reborn spiritually and healed physically. There is a huge difference between praying, “God, if it is your will, heal me.” And saying, “God, heal me according to your will.” God wants us healed. Though mental, spiritual, and physical healing are connected, I have been with both the young and the old when they were at peace dying physically, because they had been healed spiritually and I have seen people healed spiritually by being healed physically. With God all things are possible. He is the same, but we are all different. There are no limiting rules, just the goal of bringing each of us home to live immersed in His Love forever.
The scriptures show Jesus approaching healing differently for different people. “Do you want to be healed?” “Your sins are forgiven.” “Stand up and walk.” “Go show yourself to the religious authorities.” “Your faith has healed you.” “Some things take prayer and fasting.” The question isn’t whether God wants us healed. The question is where does the process need to begin.
Passion, death, and resurrection should be one word. Jesus struggling with his fears in the garden, feeling totally abandoned by his family and friends, his anguish so great that he sweat drops of blood, and finally being able to say, “Your will, not mine,” is what set Him free to rise again.
We are born again by recognizing and admitting we need to be set free, by putting ourselves in God’s hands, and then continuing to allow His Spirit to burn the chaff within us in life-long on going passiondeathandresurrections.
These things seem to me to be true: (I’ll get back to you later, when God tells me different.) 1.We all fall short: rich and poor, male and female, educated and uneducated, presidents and drug addicts, young and old, religious and non-religious, Republicans and Democrats. 2.Becoming is more important than achieving. 3. We can’t change anyone else. And the best way to help others isn’t by pretending to be a super person, but by sharing our struggle and our need for grace to become our best selves. (And that even our best selves may not be something to brag about!) 4. It takes a ton of grace and varying amounts of blood, sweat, and tears for each of us to grow closer to being the person we were created to be. (Some of us tend to make it harder for ourselves.)

Posted in Answered Prayer, Gifts of Age, Healing, Love, Personality, Political, Spiritual, Teaching/Learning Experiences, Uncategorized

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My Introduction to Violence and the Miracle of Martin Luther King

Feb 26

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About 1954 when I was seventeen, someone set a bomb off in our entrance hall. It was the night of an election with a black woman running for the school board in Houston, Texas. Segregation and the myth of separate, but equal schools were still firmly in place, and the black schools had never had representation on the board. I believe she was the first black candidate.
My father was a newspaper editor and had written editorials supporting her.
The bomb was not like bombs today. It didn’t destroy walls or knock down the door, but it had enough impact to cause the confetti packing and sharp pieces of slate to become embedded in the door and walls. It was set off about three in the morning, my father was still at the newspaper covering the election, and I was half-way down the stairs before I decided not to go to the door. That was my first personal experience of the human capacity for senseless violence.
Though my mother was from Mississippi and my father was from Louisiana, they had taught me that prejudging people on the basis of their skin color was not only wrong, it was ignorant. And ignorance was THE mortal sin in our family.
When I married and moved to Nashville, Tennessee our friends were mostly doctors and lawyers and college professors. In the middle sixties I decided to join the NAACP after one of my friends, who was a volunteer at a local hospital, informed us all angrily that, “There was no way in hell, she was going to carry that n_____ baby out to their car. And she told them that right then and there. She didn’t care who heard her.”  Obviously, a college education isn’t always a cure for ignorance.
So in 1968 I was working at the NAACP office when the Poor People’s March came through Nashville. There were many young blacks from out of town, who belonged to more militant organizations like SNCC and CORE, going in and out of the office where I was answering the phone. Their obvious strong hatred of whites, even those of us working for the NAACP, was frightening.
It seemed to me that America was headed for a bloody race war where many innocent people on both sides would be destroyed. I began to pray fervently for a miracle that would prevent that.
I have come to see Martin Luther King as that miracle. I believe whites should be as grateful to him as blacks.
I thank God for Martin Luther King.

Posted in Answered Prayer, B4Peace, Healing, Political, Spiritual

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bloggers-for-peace-badge                              Peace Begins Within

Conflict is not the same as hatred. Differences of opinion, conflicting needs, and misunderstandings are part of the human condition. But hatred is a whole other ballgame. And where there is hatred, there will be no peace.

Most, if not all, hatred and prejudice are rooted in a sort of primal human fear of being the least, of being at the bottom of our world’s value ranking.  Being at the bottom means being helpless and vulnerable to the ill will of others.

One way we assure ourselves that we are not the least valuable is finding others to consider inferior to us in some obvious way, perhaps morally.

Another way is to focus all our personal or group resources on developing a particular competitive talent or skill, so we can feel safely superior in that area and trust society to overlook our disdain for or even violence toward others.

Or, if intimidated by another person or group’s abilities, like the childhood bully, we can try to cut them down to our size with ridicule, or like Hitler, make them the scapegoat for everyone’s woes.

Hatred is a fear based response. It depends on denying our shared humanity with the “other.”
It allows us to demonize those we choose or are taught to hate, to project on them all the evil that we struggle to repress within ourselves.

I believe the increased incidence of suicide among our soldiers comes from wars that now involve being up close and personal with those in the invaded countries, who turn out to be just ordinary people like ourselves.  Then our shared humanity and helplessness expose wars of today as being murder.  And while fighting for our survival might be noble, fighting for our lifestyle is not.

Scripture says that faith casts out fear. Faith in what? Not faith that we are the chosen and somehow better than others, but rather it is faith that we are all loved by our creator.   In the hymn Amazing Grace, ‘without one plea’ means we are loved for no reason other than being God’s creations, God’s children, not for being good, or right, or a certain religion, or nationality.

Jesus says such extreme things as, ‘Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.’ Does that mean that Jesus literally is in those we consider the lowest, those we ignore and avoid, treat condescendingly, or even hate and persecute?

He goes on to say that ‘in the kingdom of heaven, those that were last on earth will be first and those that were first will be last.’ Friends, I’m pretty sure the kingdom of heaven lasts a lot longer than our days on earth. It’s something to keep in mind when evaluating our priorities, particularly those that grow out of a need to not be the least or last in this world.

Paul’s treatise on love in First Corinthians 13 insists in no uncertain terms that without love, we are nothing. If we give everything to charity, if we become the poorest of the poor, but have not love, we are nothing. If we have great spiritual or intellectual gifts, but have not love, we are nothing.

Love is kind. Love is not arrogant, envious, boastful, rude, or resentful. Love does not insist on having its own way.
Wow.
When my need to be “somebody” raises its ugly head, I reread these words, and  I have to  quickly go mentally to the back of the line.

So who are the least of God’s brethren? Those that know that without God, they are nothing. Those that walk humbly with  God.

Mother Teresa was able to undertake and persevere in her calling because she experienced both the unconditional love of God and even His discernable presence in her life before she ever began her mission and also during the times of struggle with church authorities to be allowed to do what she knew God had called her to do. Toward the end of her life, Mother Teresa went through a terrible dark depression. She had succeeded in doing what God called her to do and she had even received worldly honors and fame. But at the last, she no longer experienced God’s presence. And compared to that, nothing else mattered, not success in her mission, nor worldly acclaim.  She felt bereft.

The least are those that know that without God, who is love, we are and have nothing of eternal value. But that with God, we need nothing else.  Only then do we not suffer from the illusion that we are, or need to be, better than anyone else.

Peace begins within each of us as we grow in faith in a God who is love.

Related Article: Bloggers for Peace

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Hubris (Part Two)

Feb 23

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My father was a crusading newspaper editor in Houston, Texas. In the fifties, before the civil rights movement had begun to gain momentum, he publicly supported the first black to run for a position on the school board. This wasn’t about integration. It was just a matter of giving blacks some representation for their own schools. Late on the night of the election, someone set off a small, but potentially fatal bomb in the entrance hall to our apartment after ringing our doorbell. Though at that late hour I had enough sense to stop short of opening the door, I was close enough to recognize the danger and to feel the hatred it represented.
After marriage, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where I was part of a relatively affluent social group. One of my Candy Striper, hospital volunteer friends came to a party full of righteous indignation over being asked to carry a black newborn baby out to the car.  More and more I began to feel like a misfit in the life I was leading. So, I looked for ways to concretely work for justice for the disenfranchised. I started by going to a black elementary school to tutor young children having problems learning to read. Eventually, I volunteered for Project Equality, which involved working in the NAACP offices, interviewing, and signing up people that were looking for employment. Then I would go back to my own neighborhood and approach business owners about employing the people I had interviewed. Needless to say, other than jobs for physical labor, I was unsuccessful in my attempts.
By this time, the Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum. I was working in the NAACP offices on the day the Poor Peoples’ March on Washington came through Nashville. The more extremist black groups were in the office that day. It began to seem to me that unless a miracle happened, we were headed for a bloody race war. In hind sight, Martin Luther King and his message of non-violent protest was that miracle.
I began to search for something that would change people, not just laws. I went back to college to study Psychology and could see that it did have the potential for changing people who wanted to change. But, that was the rub. Most people either have no desire to change or can’t admit they need help to change.
About this time a couple who were part of our group of friends, began to talk about Jesus at parties. You could see people moving away, when Judy and Earl came in the door. The next thing we knew, Earl had given up his job in the family business, they were selling their home, and soliciting donations to support them in a full time ministry of evangelism with Campus Crusade for Christ. Most of us figured it was a temporary aberration and hoped they had set up trust funds for their children’s educations.
But, in my heart of hearts, I envied them believing in something enough to give up at least their lifestyle for it.
(to be continued.)

Posted in Political, Spiritual

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Yin and Yang

Feb 21

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It is not only individuals that suffer when their differences are not valued, the wellbeing of humanity as a whole suffers when complementary polarities in life are out of balance.
Traditionally natural yin and yang qualities have been perceived by society as feminine or masculine.

These have previously been labeled as follows:
Yin or Feminine        Yang or Masculine
Subjective relating        Objective questioning
Affirming                           Challenging
Nurturing                          Competing
Conserving                       Creating
Receptivity                      Assertiveness
Affect                                  Logic
Unifying                             Separating
Collective                          Discriminating
Natural                               Spiritual

The reality is that humanity has evolved past any of these being identified as gender attributes. The image of male as hunter/warrior is no more valid than male as poet/pacifist. Nor is the image of the female as nurturer more valid than female as prophet of social change.

The challenge of our day is the bringing together of these polarities at every level and in every structure of our society. The victim that loses most from an attitude that discriminates against values traditionally labeled feminine is society itself and ultimately the kingdom of God on Earth.

It is balance that is needed, it doesn’t matter which gender brings which quality into any area of society, so long as they are all valued enough to bring balance into every aspect of life.

Posted in Political, Spiritual

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Edges and Borders: Where You Stop and I Begin

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