So Much To Think About

Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? 

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August 6, 1945

Not many Americans have Aug. 6 circled on their calendars, but it’s a day that the Japanese can’t forget. 

The bombs killed an estimated 200,000 men, women and children and maimed countless more. In Hiroshima 50,000 of the city’s 76,000 buildings were completely destroyed. In Nagasaki nearly all homes within a mile and a half of the blast were wiped out. In both cities the bombs wrecked hospitals and schools. Urban infrastructure collapsed.

“Everything was burned. People were walking around with their clothes burned off, their hair singed and standing on end. Their faces were swollen, so much so that you couldn’t tell who was who. Their lips were swollen too, too swollen to speak. Their skin would fall right off and hang off their hands at the fingernails, like an inside-out glove, all black from the mud and ash. It was almost like they had black seaweed hanging from their hands.

But I was thankful that some of my classmates were alive, that they were able to make their way back.

Swarms of flies came and laid eggs in the burns, which would hatch, and the larvae would start squirming inside the skin. They couldn’t stand the pain. They’d cry and plead, ‘Get these maggots out of my skin.’

The maggots would feast on the blood and pus and get so plump and squirm. I didn’t dare use my bare hands, so I brought my chopsticks and picked them out one by one. But they kept hatching inside the skin. I spent hours picking those maggots out of my classmates.”

Chieko Kiriake (5 years old 1945)

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Social Media

Supposedly, being on social media is free. But you know that’s not true. It costs you time—hours of it, in fact, each and every day. It costs you attention. It costs you the anxiety it induces. It costs you the ability to do or think about anything else when nothing exactly is demanding your focus at the moment. It costs you the ability to read for more than a few minutes at a time. It costs you the ability to write without strangers’ replies bouncing like pinballs around your head. It costs you the freedom to be ignorant and therefore free of the latest scandal, controversy, fad, meme, or figure of speech that everyone knew last week but no one will remember next week.

Brad East

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Motherly images of God

“under the shelter of your wings”

A recurring maternal image of God’s care in Scripture is that of a mother bird sheltering her chicks under her wings. Jesus uses this imagery in the gospel of Luke when he weeps over Jerusalem: 

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”

…it’s important, for me at least, to stop and savor these motherly, maternal images of God’s love and affection. A mother’s heart is a profound and powerful window to look through when contemplating the love of God. There is no fiercer love on earth, and something divine shines through that fierceness. And it is good for your soul to know that you are loved like that.

Richard Beck

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Your story is worth listening to. 

Peter Levine said that “trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” Empathetic witnessing means holding your story/experience without rushing to fix, solve, minimize, bypass, or shame you. Consider who might be an empathetic witness to your story (this can include a therapist).

Kat Wilkins

Pondering

Can I believe in something I can’t understand?

God’s Will

For generations, the providence of God, as mysterious and perplexing as it was, created capacities for emotional resignation, humility, and patience. And I wonder if the reason our politics has become so emotionally reactive is due to the fact that we’ve lost some of this perspective, that God moves in mysterious ways. To be sure, we need to practice Lincoln’s humility when reading history. We need to stand quietly before the inscrutability of God rather than pridefully proclaiming what is or is not “God’s will” in any given historical event. Our posture is patience and trust rather than redpilling ourselves into conspiracy theories. 

I trust that God is at work in history, even in the disasters. How, I don’t know. To what purpose, I cannot say. Maybe God is rejecting America, and if so God has his reasons. We are not Israel after all. The hope of the world never depended upon us. But like Lincoln, I really don’t know what is going on. So I act with what light has been given me and wait in humility, patience, and trust. And this trust gives me just enough emotional distance from today’s news and future election results that I experience a peace that seems increasingly rare. 

Richard Beck

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Luxury Beliefs

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

…there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves. In other words, these beliefs are a luxury not because they are costly to acquire or serve predominantly to accrue social status but rather because those who hold them have the luxury to adopt them without being exposed to their real-life consequences.

 Yascha Monk

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Consumer Driven

The consumer-driven religious life has resulted in Churches that major in personal fulfillment with little attention to doctrine and sacrament. It is a new form of Christianity, one that differs from its own Protestant ancestry as much as its ancestry differed from the Catholic. And though it has its largest representation within Protestant or non-denominational Churches, both Catholic and Orthodox communities are not immune to its power and its thought. Orthodox Christians are sometimes as guilty of “shopping” for their parish (or jurisdiction) as any mega-Church seeker.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Every Human
“Every human being is a human being. Every human being is fearful—fearful of being discovered as less than they want to come across.”

John Huffman, Sr

Defending the Accused

“He’s just intense.”
“You are overreacting.”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“You need to forgive him.”
“Just turn the other cheek.”
“You are being too sensitive.”
“You must be reading into things.”
“You need to think the best of him.”
“Are you sure he meant it that way?”
“You need to look at your own self first.”
“Did you do something to provoke him?”
“You’re blowing things out of proportion.”
“No one’s perfect. You shouldn’t expect him to be.”
“He treats you that way because he cares about you.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me this. Stop gossiping.”
“We’re all sinners, so you should be gracious with him.”
“I’m sure he didn’t realize how his actions made you feel.”
“You are trying to ruin this family/organization/church/group.”
“You took something really small and made a huge deal out of it.”
“Well, you must have done something to cause him to treat you that way.”
“You’re probably stressed out right now; don’t let it cloud your judgment.”

If you’ve experienced any of these types of responses, I’m so sorry. It is disorienting and painful to be treated this way. And the commonality in these responses is that they, at best, minimize your concerns and at worst, attack you for raising them.

Scot McKnight

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