The Story... Keep on Keeping on!

Thank you to all for showing up, waking up, and resisting all the ways the Trump administration and DOGE are working to dismantle our democracy. 

Thank you to all who show up to town meetings with your elected officials, even when they don't show up. Thank you for calling, writing, emailing, and pestering those who are forgoing the oaths to defend the Constitution and represent the people, not kowtow to  the wanna-be authoritarian president donald j. trump. 

Thank you to all who support the men and women and all genders who serve our country in the armed forces and the government offices and the bureaucracies that keep us safe and help everyone live and have better lives. 

Thank you to all who are reaching out to their neighbors and relatives, checking in to see if they are alright while services for the vulnerable continue to be slashed and more road blocks are put in place like cutting phone services for social security, closing offices, and laying off thousands of government programs whose job it is to see while watching out for fraud and abuse, to make sure that those who need and those who deserve help and their social security retirement benefits get them in a timely manner. 

Thank you for all the lawsuits that are calling out the illegal actions of the administration, DOGE, and those who seek favor by blindly (maybe willfully) following the wrong way to make American better. 

Thank you to all who are standing up for the rights, the recognition, and the promise that all are created equal, not just white men and their ignorant female parrots. Thank God that we are all created in God's image no matter our skin color, gender, family, religion or beliefs, language, nationality, and anything else on this planet that would put America First. All humans deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not just those who donald j. trump deems worthy. 

Thank you for the journalists, the preachers, the prophets, the speakers, and the protesters who show up and answer Jesus' question to John's disciples "What do you see?" Do we see life, healing, compassion, unity, abundance, reconciliation, justice, or truth for all with trump and his policies and actions. Or do we see divisions, violence, misinformation , lies, greed, pettiness, retribution, immoral behavior, felonies, and imperialism in wanting to obtain Canada, Greenland, Panama, and Gaza. 

I hope in the coming days we can thank the Democrats (besides a few like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, and Governor Tim Walz) who have missed so many moments to show that they are straight up against what is happening without trying to poll the best response. Democracy is at risk. The future of our country is at risk. It's messy, roll up the sleeves and fight. If you lose, go home, take a shower, get some sleep, and fight again tomorrow. 

Thank you to all who voted for trump and realize what a mistake it was. How you thought it would always be others who have felt the pain and not yourself, your family, or your state. Let your elected officials know why you voted for him and what you didn't vote for. All politicians are supposed to work for the citizens of this country, not a political party, not an ideology, and not any one person, whether elected or not. 

Thank you for your time in readying through this all. You are loved, you are worthy, and you are enough.

Nothing Outside Contaminates

First we start with the human traditions, not all of humanity, but Western civilization under the Doctrine of Discovery that basically states that any European explorer (especially from countries that were still Roman Catholic) coming upon any land and people that weren't Christian were able to claim the land and people in the name of their king and country. This created human traditions of enslavement and taking what isn't theirs which is still happening today in Sudan with diamonds, the Congo with lithium, and Palestine with natural gas. We continue to the 1980's were the wealthy were given massive tax cuts and the unions were routinely broken up and laws were put in place to make it very hard to create one in the 'Right to Work' states. Our human traditions have created once again a wealthy class that if they lost 90% of their wealth, they would still be the most wealthy people in the world. It probably started with philosopher Francis Bacon who helped begin th...

Selling Out

Last Fall, I read a book called, "A History of Burning." It is a multi-generational story about a family that migrates from India to Uganda for hopes for a better future to help the British build a railroad, whose children through education secures a government job, but then Uganda throws off their colonial oppressors and gains independence and turns against the Indians who live there, and they have to migrate again and start all over in Toronto, Canada. It is a sad story of colonial power of the British Empire bringing in foreign cheap labor to build their infrastructure that leaves out the local population. And once Uganda gets independence, the corporations still control much of the economy and fosters division between the Ugandans and Indian to keep the country unstable. It is a triumphant story of human determination in the face of adversity, but only a few make it. One of the first paragraphs in a Wikipedia search about Africa told me that Africa is politically unstab...

You Will Be My Witnesses

The first time I served communion as a licensed minister in Fargo, ND, I picked up the tray of cups and proclaimed, "This is the cup of the new covenant!" And then I remembered we serve the bread first, panicked, and said, "Which comes after the bread!" The next time, months later, I served communion, I took the cover off the communion cups, and the altar table was stone, and I timed it perfectly, and purely accidentally, so the cover spun on the table, and you would hear it go, "whew, whew, whew" faster and faster. Sitting near the front was a couple that worked closely with me in the youth groups, each time when I began and messed up, they were bent over, hands covering their faces, taking great humor in my mistakes. In my first church in Walker, MN I messed up just about every baptism, including one time putting the head right on my lavaliere mike and the baby started crying into mike, and I almost dropped the baby when switching it around in my arms....

Vanasõna

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