For the last fifty years and especially these last five I have been on a forgiveness journey. But I did not know that it was a forgiveness journey until I knew.

Until I saw it with my own eyes, not once, but again and again, and finally experienced it for myself, I would not believe that it was what it truly was.

So I have learned to forgive, and to extend my hand to one person at a time, like the little girl on the shore who kept throwing starfish back into the sea, even though hundreds lay stranded. One starfish at a time, with irrepressible faith and hope in God’s resurrection power.

Church made me realize this.
Church succeeds because church is religion’s gathering place, and religion does what crime does.

It does what God asked community to do, but we do not do.

And I saw that religion also does the things which crime does which God asked us not to do.

I learned that religious leaders will discard you in the blink of an eye to protect their profit, without discrimination, no matter who you are.

They will gossip, scheme, and smear those who threaten the system that feeds them.

I learned that religious leaders will ignore children being harmed until it directly affects their image – which affects their profit. I learned that religion really does not care what happens to the children. When I cried and reached out to them about how children were being harmed by sexual predators in our religious community they remained silent.

See Oprah’s interview below with child sex predators to understand why I have such deep concern about the Seventh-Day Adventist Church’s lack of response about child sex offenders attending camp-meeting.

There seems to be no real plan to protect and empower children, inform and empower parents, and safely rehabilitate offenders.

https://youtu.be/vmwQd3mw5pw?si=SNov2glvTi4S4DJi

Until I saw and experienced it for myself, I thought that the Church was a caring entity – the real way.

But Jesus shows us the true Way, and reminds us that this Way is already within us.

We have forgotten it.

And so I began to look around the world at all the places that religion had told me were false and dangerous. And I found that in many of those places the real way was alive and well.

At first I was livid. I felt betrayed. And I had been. We all have been.

But then I sat with God and asked why? And as the science of the why unfolded more and more, day after day I began to forgive us for being so harmful.

Yes. Us. Not them.

I began to see that like a broken clock we are all right at least twice per day. Every day. Daily.

And in many other ways we are so very broken and misinformed.

We. Yes. We. Not them.

And as God kept assuring me that They are with us all on our journeys of healing and discovery I began to explore more courageously. I began not to look just at “them” but to look at me.

And as I looked at me I understood why Yeshua asked us to first love the Lord our God with all our heart – because in the shelter of that love we can finally face ourselves without shame.

And as we face ourselves without shame we completely lose the need to blame

And as we lose the need to blame we begin to see ourselves through the science of being human, and we understand why we do the things that we do.

As we understand why, we find better ways of meeting our needs. And as we meet our needs we begin to love ourselves again.

And then when we love ourselves we can finally love others with the same kind of robust hope and encouragement with which we love ourselves.

And as we begin to love ourselves, we begin to find more and more golden threads of informed compassion, purified through the fire of courageous examination.

Then we finally begin to repair the broken fabric of our oneness in community with the golden threads of informed compassion.

And together, we can return to the Way of thriving, truthful community, because we finally remember whom we really are.

That is why I share what I have seen and learned in scripture, as I have experienced it through the life of Jesus.

God is calling us to remember.
To awaken.
To be loved. 🥰

Viva the Loveolution.
I remember, and I forgive us for not knowing what we have been doing.