I have found love, and I live to share it. I have lived through and spoken peace to many big storms, and life has been beautiful. I believe that our individual stories are important building blocks in the beautiful communities that life was meant to be. For it is only when we share our stories, with deep compassion first for ourselves and then for each other, that we recognize that we are not alone, we are not very different, we are and have always been very much the same at the core - souls seeking to shine and enjoy the light of all others as we move through this human experience: “We’re only human and we’re looking for love... Human by Her Brothers. “ I believe in love, in the pure love modelled by Divine I AM, which is expressed in myriad ways, and in all ways is always perfect. https://youtu.be/KxluyC3JdCQ
I used to be ambivalent about Black History Month, but the more that I live and experience, the more certain I am that I feel the same distaste towards Black History Month that I feel for Affirmative Action in all its forms. Both things are an oppressive attempt to keep one set of people in their place as an “other” allowed to live adjacent to whiteness.
Just leaving these hopefully incisive thoughts for readers’ personal consideration.
Afrocentric people are here with the same range of emotions, abilities, and experiences as Caucasians. EQUAL not adjacent.
Caucasians, marinated in the idea that they are the superior and dominant people continue to consciously and unconsciously view Afrocentric people through transactional lenses, as people whose being is to be used for Caucasian profit and entertainment.
Those people whom you allow close to you you still see as house slaves, as adjacent to you as you can comfortably allow, be it that they match you in colour, or speak and live to pacify you by soothing your half deadened consciences in denial of the unconscious racism that you have yet to consciously uproot.
Because make no mistake, racism not directly addressed and uprooted is slow and painful poison to you and to the Afrocentric people with whom you interact.
Both the uppity niggers who directly challenge your latent spirit of oppression, and the field slaves who live in the made up lower socio-economic caste continue to live to transgress. We will make every opportunity to live as our true selves, and those whose agency has been so battered that they forget their ability to create opportunity only need one of us to remind them of their inherent right to freedom and equality. And that terrifies you, still unconsciously.
I would suggest that you awake to and face your fears, because “what you resist will persist”.
We resolve to stand face to face with the God in us. We have already overcome and will continue to rise.
Seriously, I am no longer co-signing and giving any energy to any days and months of awareness of oppression. We know what we did. We know that it was wrong. If we haven’t stopped to look at ourselves and change for the better that is a choice.
Every day in my life is human day, and my resolve is to continue to show up as myself every day for humans.
However, I am here for any and all celebrations of living life. Let’s dance.
Have you ever looked yourself in the eyes, in the heart with God, and seen elements of Judas looking back? 😂 I’m serious like a heart attack. 😳
If you know me, you know that I’ve had this long running conversation with God about Judas and Jesus: I mean, why? You know it all; why would You keep him by You, in Your close circle, with the twelve whom You’re mentoring for leadership after You’ve left? And you’ve probably heard me say some time ago that in my own life I saw myself as Judas – no one else can betray me as well as I can.
This is the thing that I love about life with God. He’s not afraid to wound me, and I’m learning not to be afraid to let Him. His incisions are always perfectly executed, and His repair is precise and perfectly restorative. Because faithful are the wounds of a friend, or the slap 👋🏾, but an enemy multiplies kisses. Remember this always.
But back to the Judas in me. In fact it is absolutely not the Judas in me. Judas was a human being like any other, just like you and me. It is the me in me. Elements of human nature, elements of knowing evil. The result of environment and experience; nature and nurture. We carry around massive beams that stick out of our eyes, and knock others out while we try to blow dust out of their eyes. Psst. Secret. People feel their dust, and can pretty much handle it on their own. But that beam sis, that beam needs more people.
So God has lined up a whoooole cloud of witnesses to help with my beam work. From Adam to now. The point is that when I see my beams I won’t run out and hang myself thereby becoming maggot food. God hopes that I will feel cut to the heart by His piercing gaze of love – because He’s already told me over and over that the evil one is trying to “sift me like wheat”, and then I’ll come back to talk with Him, to reaffirm our love, mine for Him, and His for me, and then carry on with the business of loving and sharing the hope of living in love with Him. The cloud of witnesses matter, because one common thread runs through our experience: God loves us regardless of what we do, and He has literally given everything to ensure that we can choose to return to His love, or not. He has ensured that despair is never our inheritance. Look in my eyes and hear me say with the cloud of witnesses that you never ever HAVE to be maggot food. You get to choose life AND you are fully loved. God delights to see what you would like to become, and He is here for all of it.
So this morning was the end of this round of God surgery. I almost keeled over with laughter when He said, “ Yeah. They can’t stand you either.” If you know, you know, and if you don’t find it on Feb 20.22, So I Go To Church. On Sunday we had done some Judas work; on Monday we did some more; on Tuesday we took a praise break, and then THIS morning as soon as I awoke He hit me with the punchline: “Yeah. They can’t stand you either.” He’s so funny. I like Him.
Anyway, see you in church some time. But friend, please believe that I very much meant it when I said that I’m not here for a whited sepulchre life, so we better wake the fuck up, and start being us instead of being hollow echo chambers of selfishness. Judas was a disciple just like all the others. He spoke truth and worked in the name of Jesus. His fatal flaw was that he thought to force change HIS way. I don’t plan to make myself maggot food. I definitely plan to keep speaking truth and living in love.
“The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones”. Let’s change that. Celebrate the good, and let evil die.
Coming to you from MY place. I see MY face. Much love.
Hmm… You know, let’s not bury the evil. For it is in knowing the light and the dark that we know the whole of anything, and so how can we truly know each other if we do not allow the light and the dark of us to tell a complete story. So here is what I think. Instead of burying the good, let’s begin to keep the good alive, and see every whole person, for more than just the harm that they have done.
🌺♾💚 I’m just noticing that this photo which means so much to me was taken at 4:44 – a call to unity (Ezekiel 1) – on 2-22. Numbers are fun and meaningful. But that’s not what I came to say.
In this world where we know evil, our brains naturally focus on the negative to promote our survival. That’s a very important tool when one is dependent on oneself for survival.
However, when one can trust God to help us survive we begin to be able to see more than just survival. And even so God is not enough. I know. I heard the gasps all around. But hear me out.
We were made for connection. In a perfect world, Adam keenly felt the absence of another. I believe that God allowed Him to feel that deep need because we were to always remember that to thrive we need each other.
Even the thought of being separate from Eve was so hard for Adam to bear that he chose to eat the fruit with her.
Connection matters. Community matters. Turning away from someone, or allowing them to struggle on their own because we think that they should do better is counter to the growth of love. For while we should feed on appreciation instead of on expectations, it is infinitely difficult to appreciate appreciation alone.
I’m just sitting here and thinking on the wonder of our Heavenly Family’s absolutely deliberately undignified, unfettered expression of love for us.
Jesus was born in a common house with people and animals, purportedly disgracefully conceived out of wedlock (Luke 2:5-7).
As a baby, He fled as a refugee to Egypt (Matthew 2:13-15).
He returned to live in Nazareth of ill repute, the idea of which was so ludicrous that Philip scoffed at it when He was invited to meet Jesus (Matthew 2:19-23; John 1:45-46).
By Jesus’ own words, “foxes had holes and birds had nests’” but He was homeless (Luke 9:58).
Jesus publicly prioritized relationship with the misunderstood, the miscreants, the misfits, (Luke 5:27-30) naked adulteress (John 8:3-9), short crooked tax man (Luke 19:1-10), free-loving foreign isolated water-seeking woman (John 5:4-42).
In the stories that demonstrated the recklessness of His Father’s love, Jesus compared Him to: a woman – on hands and knees looking desperately for her one lost precious coin (Luke 15:8-10).
a shepherd – making His way through thick brush and muddy ditches to find one lost sheep (Luke 15:4-7).
a freedom-loving, choice-giving father who ran with unceremonious joy to meet and embrace his wayward bedraggled son (Luke 15:11-24).
an understanding father seeking out his envious, pouting son (Luke 15:25-32).
Jesus, the Son of God, did not measure His value by the standards of men who hoarded wealth and influence, and who were willing to ignore the bloody, bruised, and broken to protect these moth-riddled, rusty treasures. In fact, He called people to abandon this intentionally blind scarcity mindset to live in the faith-filled certainty of compassionate abundance (Luke 10:30-37).
Jesus knew whom He was, a man of infinite grace and mercy, royalty in rags, who had given away everything that He owned to ensure that the praying pompous poor, and the wise consciously needy both had access to everlasting life (Luke 18:9-14).
Jesus was full gangsta revolutionary loving, and I am here and grateful for it (John 3:16-17).
The majority of Caucasian Canadians like to tell themselves that racism, domination, and oppression against Indigenous and Afrocentric people is an American problem. Until you can look yourselves in the face, and acknowledge the truth, there will always be a veiled darkness that prevents you from being in the true process of transformation. You’ll be stuck as caterpillars masquerading as butterflies.
Just prior to Canada Day in 2021 children spoke to you from the grave – two hundred and fifteen dead children called you to honesty, so you could not celebrate reaching colonial goals without being aware that you celebrate brutally won victories, pyrrhic ones.
For many decades I and others have been calling you to look at where the legacy of those dead children have taken you.
For decades, Indigenous and Afrocentric people have been speaking and you have refused to really listen.
Now, today, thousands of living children, most of them Indigenous, traumatized by inept child protection systems and apathetic communities are crying out for you to look at what your systems, your ways of being have done to them. And you are refusing to look. Until you see them, and lift that veil of darkness you will never be able to see your true self.
The sad thing, or maybe just the reality, is that you won’t really give a damn until your children are the ones screaming to be seen and heard. And we know this, because you’ve demonstrated just that by creating screaming convoys and flocking together and labelling “the others” covidiots in this season, because you are afraid for YOUR life, freedom, and power.
And that’s okay. Because freedom always comes. The sad fact is that oppressors can only hope that those whom they oppress with complicit silence or active persecution will not seek vengeance when in the fullness of time they win their freedom.
You can only hope that one awakened to love leads the people to freedom, unity, and reconciliation, instead of one consumed by hate who will orchestrate a bloodbath.
You’ll function as caterpillars with your version of butterfly ways. I hope that one day you will allow the veil to be lifted so that you can become real butterflies with butterfly hearts and ways. Because although love will eventually ultimately win, your choices now determine whether that journey will be fraught with pain or alive with joy.
I said, “okay God, I’m going to church”, and He activated my premium subscription in training to practice what I believe. If you believe it, you gotta live it.
I got teary angry and walked out and came back three times, with God reminding me why I was there.
Because I don’t go to church to learn what I am supposed to believe. The Spirit of God takes care of that in a plethora of ways through interaction with all people as I fully live in the real world.
Church for me is an exercise in tolerance and unity, where the singing is great, we can learn to do meaningful service projects together, and I can ideally say both “right on dude I’m with you on that” AND “are you serious what the fuck are you saying” and wait to hear. For that last bit God and my teacher, David, are working on getting me to inhale/exhale and say “Tell me more”.
So I am going to sit here and inhale – exhale, fellow human, and remember that interacting with other people in church is about choosing to listen, knowing when to gracefully exit before rupturing relationship with strong emotive words, and knowing when to call a viper a whited sepulchre viper. Because that’s what Jesus did.
And because I went to church, I have some thoughts to share.
This is not the most divided that Canada has ever been. Indigenous and other people who are not Caucasian have been advocating for equity for generations. There has been a massive imbalance in your favour.
When movement started being made toward equity, you used your platform to complain about how your children would suffer in this more equitable world, since they might no longer have the benefit of oppression on their sides (but I don’t think you realized that this is what you were saying). What you actually said is that hiring requirements were being dumbed down to give people of colour an opportunity to generate income, and this was unfair to your better educated children. See a problem there?
You suggested that if people of so-called colour wanted you to support us that we should probably be nicer to you, because we hurt your feelings by speaking candid truth, and so you were likely to stomp away from us, and refuse to help us at all.
So, this is not the most divided that Canada has ever been. This is the most divided that Caucasians in Canada have ever been. Because the majority of you are worried about losing your life, your agency, and your money, whether you are vaccinated, unvaccinated, for mandates, or against mandates. The problem is that all of you are worried about losing your life, your agency, and your money, and mandates are the scapegoats that you are using to avoid looking more closely at what really scares you.
Do you hear the rest of us now?
That listening part is where unity begins. People know that they are loved, when they know that they are seen and heard, and believed. That’s how Jesus loved. The loaves and fishes were incidentals. The oil changes and homes repaired are incidentals. They are the scapegoats that allow you to look away from the children and families who need to be seen, heard, and believed.
Jesus went to find the woman at the well, sent pigs careening over a cliff, challenged all the unjust ways of all humanity in His parables and His daily life. So He definitely took a side, the side of love and justice for all humanity, and He was crucified for it.
The thing that Jesus resolutely refused to do was to participate in useless nationalism. Because nationalism was a scapegoat and He was not here for that.
This is my last word ever, I think, on church and its ways of being. I hoped to be able to work with the people who gather each week and say that we gather as a family. Clearly that is not to be. Because if we are family, we are a hella dysfunctional family, who is always focused on how nice our house is, and who have made this house which is supposed to be a house of love and prayer and unity, a marketplace where we need to focus on paying the bills to maintain its beauty. Jesus wasn’t here for that either.
In fact, God specifically said that He didn’t need a house. He knew what the house would become. I realized that this was likely so, as I read the temple story in the Old Testament books of history. Geeky Christian breaks this down well, here: (https://geekychristian.com/evidence-the-temple-was-not-gods-will/ ) God knew that the wise one who would build it would use forced labour (1 Kings 9:15 – The Bible), and would have a bloodbath flowing across its floors supposedly in His honour (1 Kings 8:5 – The Bible) . And He stayed around for it, because He recognized that this husk of a marketplace was the best that humanity could do, and it would carry the seed of His glory. We needed the seed, not the marketplace. And we still haven’t learned that.
Anyway, this is my last and final word ever, I think, on church. I am now focusing on finding other incompetent people like me who will let the Spirit of God guide us in unity to learn how to see, hear, and believe people so that we can serve them in love. I think that’s what Jesus did, and I am here for it.
There has been a lot on my mind this week, and so this video is a bit longer than usual. I promised Leah that I would do a regular Saturday post, and so far I’ve been able to do it. We’ll see… I was about to say that we’ll see how long this lasts, and I am choosing to reshape that thought. I am committing to posting whatever is on my heart. I’m not committing to a post of a specific length, or promising to only show certain emotions. I will show up as myself, with care and consideration for you too, every Saturday.
This week my heart was focused on how to continue to be the truth of being enough, even in the middle of painful and challenging circumstances. Thankfully, early on Saturday/Sabbath morning, my Father, our Father reminded me that because He is all, He will be everything, and He will hold me while I find my footing in hard places. And so I share from that place in my heart bits of my story, a little of the story of melanated (containing higher concentrations of the skin pigment melanin) Afrocentric people as we hold to the hope of the dream of unity, on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, and I look at some hard parts of the ancient story of Esther, orphaned Jew who became Queen of Persia and also of Joseph, son of Jacob.
What I do not say in the video, but will say here, is that as my best friend, Tina, who is Caucasian, and I, were reflecting on the black dog incident, she said that while she wondered if she had heard what she thought she heard that Caucasian man say, she saw several emotions flash across my face so quickly that she wasn’t sure if she had indeed seen them. And further, she thought, as I confirmed what she saw, that someone who did not know me, as she does, would never have seen that microsecond internal battle.
I speak to that because this a weight that melanated people, who do not live in denial, carry as a part of daily life – specifically those of us who do not live in denial that racism exists. This pause to process robs us of energy and focus that could be used in the wonderful business of building our global community of love. Unfortunately, those of us who live in denial of racism and its impact lose the benefit of building the superpower to do intense battle in microseconds, which includes making a plan and a promise to tend to the emotions which we cannot address in the moment. So although it is a weight, it is a weight that we shed, which allows us to continue to thrive. Denial means that this invisible weight continues to expand and robs the denier of space and time to heal. The poison of unprocessed and unacknowledged hate robs you of gentleness, love, and joy, my friend. And so I share with you Carl Jung’s words which I hold close to my heart, and which are now an unconscious part of my consciousness, “What you resist will persist”.
There is great power in acknowledging the truth of things as they are, for it is in so doing that one can know how to be well equipped to clear the stumbling blocks on the path of love. Because my friend, there are obstacles on that path, and even so, you are still enough.
Choose to actively plant love and equality for all people in our collective consciousness. Choose to uproot the lingering polluting ideas of dominance and submissiveness that were deliberately branded into our minds and bodies. LoveTip444 #HealGrowLove #AntiRacist #ARCVancouver #BlackShirtDay #Movement
What if I told you that Jesus did not create Christianity?
What if I told you that Jesus said that He came to show us His Father? John 14:7-11
What if I told you that Jesus said that He came to create division, to have even families challenging each other’s thoughts about the way to be? Matthew 10:34-36; Luke 12:49-53
What if I told you that I love the Bible as a book of history and hope, compiled by people, each author’s contribution a recording of their experience and understanding of God in their world?
What if I told you that God did not write the Bible and did not ask humanity to let the Bible be our perpetual ultimate cultural or moral guide?
What if I told you that people chose the writings that would be a part of the compilation called the Bible?
What if I told you that the Spirit, the Comforter, the Essence of Love is living with us as Jesus promised?
What if I told you that the Spirit wants to personally interact with each one of us?
What if I told you that every person, young and old, of all abilities, skills, and knowledge, can depend on the Spirit as our one and only final Source of inspiration and wisdom?
What if I told you that humans have created many religions from many revelations, because the Spirit can speak to all who wish to listen?
What if I told you that humans in all religions and all traditions got some things right and some things wrong?
What if I told you that the advice to study for ourselves means that we are not to follow any leader blindly?
What if I told you that we are each responsible for what we know and learn?
What if I told you that we are each responsible for what we create with what we learn?
What if you hold all these things in your mind?
What happens in your heart?
“Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.”
Jesus did not have to die. Our Father did not require Jesus to die. Nor did He require us to die. Our Father was not so angry with us that He needed to pummel the life out of Jesus instead of pummeling the life out of us. That is not love. That is torture. Death in all its forms is torturous. Torture is not the consequence of our bad choices. Every choice comes with its natural consequence, not a contrived punishment, a natural consequence.
Jesus came to teach us how to live. Jesus came to show us the personification of His Father’s character. Jesus came to show us how to be love.
I believe that animal sacrifice was instituted to prevent humans from selfishly killing each other to seek favour from the hollow gods whom they created because of the deception of the enemy of Love. And we might ask why God never told people that animal sacrifice was an ineffective ritual. I believe that He did.
Hosea chapter 6, verses 4-7:
“O Israel and Judah, what should I do with you?” asks the Lord. “For your love vanishes like the morning mist and disappears like dew in the sunlight.
I sent my prophets to cut you to pieces— to slaughter you with my words, with judgments as inescapable as light.
And if He said it once, I am positive that He said it before, since, and over and over again. But we do not listen.
Therefore because He speaks to us and interacts with us in language that He knows we will understand, He allowed sacrifice for a while. And maybe knowing that the horror of the brutal murder of His innocent Son, Who perfectly lived love, would forever stand as the best example of the horror of blood sacrifice, They allowed His death to be, knowing that Jesus would be resurrected. Humanity has never simply done what we are told is best.
Truth is God’s only weapon. The truth cuts through our brokenness with divine accuracy, and allows love to be born and to mature in us, if we let it be so.
For God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son, that whosoever would believe in Him would not perish, but would have everlasting life.
For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world, through Him, might be saved. John 3:16-17
To be honest, I don’t even know if I believe that God instituted the sacrifice of animals. This is a conversation that we shall have, maybe.
Do animals fear us? Do animals typically look at us with fear and terror, if we have not terrorized them?
Something does not compute.
May we begin to learn how to live in love. May we begin to embrace truth, truth-telling, and truth-tellers in our lives. All in love.
Nurturing Kindred 