If you are an Afrocentric person of colour, I declare a blessing over you: freedom for you lies in disentangling yourself from the colonizing spirit which you have been taught is god.
Remember who you are.
And now I bless us all. Freedom for us lies in disentangling ourselves from the colonizing, genocidal bully spirit which we have been taught is god.
Remember who you are.
God restores. God frees. God comes with equity. Any person, organization, or system which elevates itself over you is still bound by a colonizing spirit. Rebuke that spirit, receive God’s gift of grace, and claim your freedom.
“Free YOUR mind. The rest will follow.”
This weekend, the government of Canada appropriated Phyllis Webstad’s Orange Shirt Day, calling it Truth and Reconciliation Day, in a country whose federal and provincial policies still feed predatorily on the freedom, energy, and pain of non-Eurocentric people, while trying to gaslight us into celebrating them as saviours instead of as debtors who owe the people whom they oppressed an incalculable sum in reparations. One needs only to glance at federal and provincial statistics to see the glaring truth. That truth is also played out in every day interpersonal relationships between Eurocentric and Afrocentric people, where there is still unconscious incompetence or conscious incompetence in the skill of living with equity.
And so as my Sunday morning on September 29, 2024 began with a circle of seven BIPOC women who gathered to bear witness to the pain “Behind the Smile”, in a space hosted by Moms Against Racism an organization created by Kerry Cavers, a courageous Afrocentric woman, God, whom I now experience in freedom, lead me on a quest which certainly did not begin with me, and which will not end with me.
God, who continues to free me from fearing or seeking the approval of colonizers and their god made in their image and after their ways, inspired me to follow a path of freedom across the ocean by choice, to reclaim the peace and freedom stolen from my ancestors through a journey of forgiveness, to forgive my debtors as God forgives my debts.
Since my Afrocentric ancestors were stolen from their homeland hundreds of years ago, and forced to cross the ocean as cargo, then tortured and treated inhumanely in an attempt to perpetrate genocide through cultural hegemony sanctioned by Eurocentric law, I have no earthly access to the spiritual legacy of my ancestors.
BUT GOD! I use the word but very carefully, as I have come to learn more and more about being impeccable with my word. But erases the power of everything that came before it, and so this time I boldly and intentionally declare: BUT GOD who loves perfectly, and whom I have also forgiven for the atrocities perpetrated against my ancestors, holds the wealth of my ancestors’ inheritance of spiritual connection perfectly in tact in Their hands, and so I trusted Them to guide, provide for, and protect me on this journey.
I love and care for all of humanity as I continue my quest to encourage every person to seek healing for the deep wounds which these atrocities have inflicted on our collective psyche. While I encourage us all to seek healing, I stand to bear witness to the process as an Afrocentric woman. For whom, and as whom, do you engage and bear witness on this quest for truth, restitution, restoration, and reconciliation?
As a woman who has continued to be silenced, ignored, and deliberately destabilized as I speak to governments, churches, and para-church organizations about the harm that their policies are doing to children, and to vulnerable people and families, I share this information publicly as we approach Truth and Reconciliation Day, in Canada.
Today, is Friday, September 27, 2024. It is currently 07:26 PST. I have been lying awake for several hours thinking deeply as usual about what merely I can do to motivate the community, we, the people, to move forward with using our power to actually create a healing equitable culture, in British Columbia, in Canada, and across the world. I opened social media to try to give my mind a break from the heaviness of the matter that has long been simmering in my mind, and the article below from the UBC Indian Residential School and Dialogue Centre (https://collections.irshdc.ubc.ca/Detail/objects/11902#) was the first thing that I saw. I cannot ignore the synchronicity of this.
Survivors have spoken their truth, at Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, and other events hosted by government, churches, and other Eurocentric-centred para-church organizations. Yet none of these power and wealth hoarding bodies are truly doing anything to move forward with creating the restoration and healing that will result in progress through reconciliation. In fact, historically and continually, they have silenced and attempted to assimilate or harm speakers who have attempted to shine light on the continuing atrocities of racism and other forms of oppressive discrimination.
They claim to have conversations about these issues that continue to deeply affect the mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, and financial wellness of Indigenous and other colonized and oppressed global majority and other marginalized communities.
Yet, the conversations are still centred around the comfort and upward mobility of the colonizing minority, while the voices of the affected are silenced, as marginalized global majority speakers for progressive reform are muzzled, discredited, and effectively institutionalized through insidious smear campaigns.
And therefore I must be more resolutely vocal henceforth. Today, I begin to share my story. Who will actively stand with me to both listen and speak for progressive equity? I shall be silenced no more.
September 28, 2024
This morning I awoke and read an email, purportedly mass sent yesterday morning, from the Premier of British Columbia, David Eby, leader of the NDP. Mr. Eby was asking me, and every other British Columbian, including BIPOC families, to help him win the biggest fight of his life. He wants us to help him win this coming election, to support him in his quest to be a champion for all, and especially for the most vulnerable of us.
Mr. Eby shared his story, showed us where it all started, told us that he was an advocate for the downtrodden unhoused on Vancouver’s Eastside. Mr. Eby says that “[he has]… always believed if something’s not right, you speak up. If somebody needs help, you help them.
And right now, [he needs our] help” to get elected. He paints Mr. Rustad as a conspiracy theorist who would gut vital socioeconomic policies, and ignore the needs of every day British Columbians, and I agree.
I agree that we cannot afford to elect to leadership anyone who elevates narratives of division. We cannot afford to elect anyone who consciously subscribes to an elitist hierarchical system which relegates a large percentage of humans to the category of collateral damage who live or die in support of the hoarding of money, influence, and control by a few.
We cannot afford to elect to leadership anyone who directly or indirectly pits members of British Columbian communities against each other with direct or indirect assertions that British Columbia is being economically and culturally destabilized by “newcomers “ or ungrateful Natives.
Such a narrative is grounded in the very government initiated and sanctioned atrocities from which we say we seek to heal through official Truth and Reconciliation processes.
Therefore I agree that this quest for leadership is one with which we need to to help Mr. Eby. But then what?
Can we trust Mr. Eby to actually listen to those of us who speak up when we see something wrong? Can we trust Mr. Eby to lead us to action as a community empowered to work respectfully and effectively together? Can we trust Mr. Eby to build a team which helps us all to thrive by facilitating ways for us to help each other when we need help?
I wish that I could confidently trust Mr. Eby to do any of those things when he seems to continue to refuse to listen to all British Columbians, especially the most vulnerable of us, especially those of us who work with the most vulnerable, and who have been enduring personal suffering as we attempt to serve the very demographic which Mr. Eby says started it all for him.
We are less than forty-eight hours away from the celebration or observance of Truth and Reconciliation Day, and in the City of Chilliwack, where I live, homelessness and economic poverty is at an all-time high. I specifically stipulate economic poverty because there is infinite wealth of love, diversity, innovation, and creativity in the Chilliwack community.
As a queer, single, BIPOC mother, it has been my experience that Mr. Eby’s NDP does not listen to nor welcome most who speak up when they see something wrong, and they certainly have not in my experience welcomed or supported those who take action to mitigate and/or prevent damage, and promote growth and healing in the most vulnerable in our communities.
As Truth and Reconciliation Day approaches, Indigenous and BIPOC children are still grossly overrepresented in the Child Welfare system and in the lowest socioeconomic bracket in BC.
And as a foster parent who served under the NDP government for nine years, and who was penalized and fired specifically for speaking up and for helping when help was needed, as a mother whose children adopted through MCFD, have been abandoned by Mr. Eby’s NDP and left to come to harm, and neither served nor protected by the RCMP under Mr. Eby’s NDP, as an independent community worker whose initiative to inspire the community to stand with vulnerable, traumatized women and children was ignored and undermined by Mr. Eby’s NDP, and as a person who now has a disability and who continues to valiantly fight to stand when left to flounder by Mr. Eby’s NDP, I ask, if with my vote I give you the opportunity to lead, what good will it do for those of us who are consistently systemically disenfranchised, much like those on whose backs, in your email, you wish to stand to encourage us to choose you as leader of ALL the people of British Columbia?
To be honest, Mr. Eby, the only reason that I would consider you for leadership is because you clearly have some sort of vision, and some sort of wisdom which lead you to align with Kelli Paddon, who listens and is therefore able to take proactive action when she sees that something is not right. When someone needs help, she helps as much as she is able. She sees something in you that makes you worthy of leadership. Given the poor lived experience that I and many others according to statistics have had under your leadership Mr. Eby, what can you say to us that will build our confidence in your ability to do better.
Truthfully, what will you do to promote healing, restoration, and reconciliation which are key components of the recipe for building prosperous, successful, healthy communities in BC?
There’s an elder Eurocentric dude, whom in my pissedness I used to refer to as “that fucking old White man” who tried to fix me by getting in my face about dismantling what he defined as my self-made prison bars, as he also tried to confront me into “healing” by shaming me about what he called the unhealthy size of my body.
I responded to him that my defensive bars and my unhealthy body have preserved my life, and they would be perfectly transformed when I was free to be me.
He was a potato whom I had to decisively and consciously separate from me without smashing him to smithereens, so that he could have the opportunity to grow and thrive. If you know you know. Choices. They matter.
Thankfully, before I stepped into that arena, I had already decided to hand mental fuck yous to these saviours who refused to hear that I was not a victim who needed their fix. My decision to arm myself with those fucks protected me from their unwitting well-intentioned harmful methods of engagement. My decision to arm myself with those fucks prevented me from allowing their egos to reign over me, prevented me from allowing them to silence my voice, prevented me from accepting that they were experts who knew better than I what I needed to progress. I was created master of my own medicine.
I armed myself with those fucks, and my self-protection also prevented me from being able to focus my energy on sifting for the load of gold which I knew was a part of their planned process, even though the gold was mixed in with a load of bullshit. Wheat and tares. Sometimes I forget that this is the reality of life for all of us.
I retreated into myself for a while fully enraged to the point of laughter, which showed up as contempt. Thankfully, that smirking contempt was challenged by one of the saviours in the space. “This is not a joke,” they said.
I didn’t fight with them. That’s growth. That was my healing ability to listen kicking in. Though rage filled me, my spiritual ears sifted and translated their words through my heart instead of through my detached raging head. The gold that was left was this: hey, we’re here to heal together.
And so I let God (The Team of Three) hold me in that space safe from the supremacy of saviours, and bring me into engagement with equals, not because they saw me as an equal, but because I knew whom I was. God let me roll with my fucks because my need for protection is and was one hundred percent genuine.
And so I handed my defensive fucks over to God, so that the gold of healing could be poured into me. I allowed My Love Most High, God called Father, whom I firmly believe is non-binary, to use Their gold of love to fill the cracks in my connection with the saviours. It took years of exposure therapy to get there.
The saviours are saviours because they are unable to face the reality that the dehumanizing virus of racism is still in them. They don’t consciously want to enslave us anymore, although they are willing to exploit our coloured bodies to increase their clout and influence, to build their legacy as hero-saviours, and they still, sometimes unconsciously, see themselves as our superiors who are the only ones able to teach us how to become at least marginally as good as they are.
They still see us as children looking up to them as parents – children who must be teachable, obedient, and pliable, for whom they will provide significance if we comply with their wishes. They see us as children whom they will punish in the prison of disconnection if we fail to comply.
And so if you are a person of colour reading this, I hope that you will exhale enough to consciously connect with your armour of fucks so that you can allow God to take those fucks which have been plugging up the rage that we have often turned into laughter and tomfoolery in order to survive. I hope that you will allow God to clear that plug so that you can release the rage into Their hands, and finally consciously stand firmly in your place as an equal made in the image of God, instead of merely surviving as someone whose value is found in closely as possibly conforming to the expectation of the Eurocentric saviour.
Remember that we all need healing so that we can be awoken from our systemically induced comas. Remember that we were all created master of our own medicine.
And may that release fill us with compassion for those who are still saviours because they are still grappling with an inheritance of supremacy which is deeply ingrained in their identity.
Pray with me that we will all wake up and remember that we are all humans created in the image of God, all equally designed to reflect God’s light. And as we wake up may we not build bigger barns to hoard our light. May we liberally share the light so that all may see before we die, and our light dies with us.
Asé and amen. So it is done, in the almighty name of revolutionary Jesus who came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword. The sword is the word of God, and that word is NOT the Bible.
It may be that you’re not ready to talk about that. That’s okay. Fair warning. I AM.
OH! PS:
There is one very important detail which I forgot to include, a pivotal detail really: “That fucking old White man” has his own rainbow room at home in my heart now. Now I think of him by his name, Mike. Because while I was incredibly fucking raging because of him, his was also the voice that helped to shore up my courage and validate my choice to participate in the process before I even entered the room.
Here’s the story: As I prepared for that working retreat, I was both excited and sick to my stomach because I did not trust the people in leadership at that event, though I trusted the process. Just before I left my house for the drive there I had a strong message that I NEEDED my own Warmth And Loving Kindness rainbow blanket. I had never made myself one.
I didn’t have time to make it, and I did have time to cut it. So I cut it and brought the fabric with me. When I got to the venue, Sxexet Spath ‘s welcoming warrior-defender energy greeted me, and Cally’s encouraging wink and smile reminded me that no matter where I was, I was with family.
I bubbled up with big bright canary-eagle energy as I usually do, AND I also felt like I needed to find myself shelter where I could bring myself to calm, to reclaim my peace.
I found a warm little nook. At first I thought I was alone, and then I noticed that an Indigenous aunty was already quietly enjoying solitude in that space. I asked permission to come in, and she invited me to join her. I did.
I asked about her, and she told me her story while I tied knots of warmth and loving-kindness for myself, to reclaim my peace.
After a while, Aunty left the room, and I was alone with my thoughts and my blanket. I had almost decided to leave because the weight of distrust sat heavily in my soul. And then a voice broke through my thoughts. It said to the person with whom it was speaking: “Remember that you get to decide whether you participate or not. You’re in charge. No one can make you do anything.”
I was like, “OH fuck! Yeah! IT’S ON!” And so it was.
Turns out that Mike and I are a lot more alike than not. He’s good people who bring out the fucks in me, and there as many and varied of those in me as there are stars in the galaxy. And that is a perfectly beautiful thing, because it means that I am living indeed, in freedom.
Living life as exposure therapy has been such an incredible experience. Below is but a minute fraction of the family which healing has brought me. I love you all.
October 22, 2021 mental health break, or break. I chose to live, and so took this beautiful break with Tina and Francis Douville.
Over and over every day, I choose life.
Finding and creating unicorns, living with supernatural power is essential to being for me.
I share the sunsets, oceans, stories, and people which remind me that life is beautiful, and which heighten my resolve to keep choosing life and its joy over and over again.
God – all three – and I profoundly experience lessons and gifts in the tiniest people and organisms and pests throughout every day. We do this because celebrating the wisdom and inestimable value of connection with all proves that all are of equal importance and influence, whether that is seen by the blind or not.
You don’t see the time spent wrapped in God’s arms as we move through a lifetime of healing from and living with excruciating pain.
And I share the medicine in photos and stories because there are others who experience the world similarly who need to know that we can keep choosing life every day until we have fully lived and wrung the last drop of joy out of living and magnifying the light of life undomesticated and free, because God is with us.
Aunty Maya said, “only equals make friends”. And for a while I argued with her about that.
Then I stopped trying to prove to her that since all people are equal, she must be dead wrong.
I began to listen to and more closely observe the world around me to try to understand her point of view.
Along that listening journey I happened to read Ecclesiastes 7:28, and there is where my big mental wrestle with Solomon began and where my questions about the purpose and origin of the Bible increased.
Ecclesiastes 7:28 NLT Though I have searched repeatedly, I have not found what I was looking for. Only one out of a thousand men is virtuous, but not one woman! 29But I did find this: God created people to be virtuous, but they have each turned to follow their own downward path.”
NOT ONE GOOD WOMAN??? What the fuck, Solomon??
And then I began to understand Aunty Maya. Only people whom we perceive to be our equals can truly be our friends. Only people whom we choose to accept and understand can truly be our friends.
It’s a you thing, not a them thing. It’s a me thing, not a them thing.
We look at the people in our lives, and without deep thought we are to immediately identify them as either a giver or a taker.
Do a mental inventory of your friends. Into what category does your mind automatically file them?
At the end of that assess why you perceive them as you do, and ask yourself if you have truly been relating to each as a friend, or as a dependent, or as a saviour.
How does your energetic relationship with each person shift because of your perception before and after examining your thoughts about them?
May we remember that today is Juneteenth, the date when two years after they were legally freed, hundreds of Afrocentric people finally learned of their legislated freedom.
They were free, and still disenfranchised as all people who formerly owned Afrocentric people received compensation from the government for the loss of their human property, while the formerly legally enslaved people have yet to receive compensation for their loss of dignity or their loss of the ability to live as themselves to build reasonably profitable lives.
Legislation did not then, and has still not magically transformed the minds of the masses regarding the social hierarchy and worth of formerly enslaved people.
We live with that legacy of dehumanization to this day. We experience it daily with a prolonged campaign of systemic gaslighting to convince us that we are insane if we believe that open racism has been restructured to a more subtle caste system which continues the legacy of injustice.
Only conscious acceptance of this reality will create transformation.
Alcohol is truth serum for this person well positioned and respected in the social hierarchy.
The dream is that one day we will no longer bear this burden. In the meantime we will continue to sail with this atmospheric factor affecting our journey.
I have been thinking about what I would say is the most important thing that I have learnt in all of my life. And today I think this is it: in this and every single moment of our lives with no exceptions we are your own heroes.
Does that sound like a self-centred, narcissistic, egotistical, implausible statement? Why? Why does it seem to be that?
Being grateful doesn’t mean that any human needs to suspend the ability to see themselves as the most skillful valuable asset to themselves, as a person who is meant to both profit and serve best in community.
Some of you might wonder why this is a groundbreaking thought for me.
It seems to me that many, if not all of us have been socialized to think of ourselves as heroes and missionary saviours to others. We fail to see all peoples’ worth and value through any other lenses but our own. And in that system we do not see all people, including and especially ourselves, as the heroes of their own lives. We have been taught that the heroes are those who save us.
The central idea to that belief is that we do not know best how to save ourselves, and we are taught to believe that we are inept if we delete, defer, or delegate tasks in order to empower us to be our best. We are only successful when we do everything ourselves, especially if the thing that we do allows us to hoard stores of money.
Therefore, we see those who seek assistance, especially monetary assistance, as unwise and unskilled.
That’s not our fault. It is a common human experience.
It is the impact of being raised in intrinsically narcissistic religious and political systems that position themselves as the definition of good and as keepers of the key to connection with God.
It is the impact of being raised in systems which teach us to define our worth by seeing how closely we can be a reflection of those systems.
They teach us to claim the systemic ways as our ways and to assert these ways of being as the best and wisest.
I come to this understanding as I reflect on how our family has endured through factors that even we still don’t comprehend, while being of service to everyone possible without optimal financial and relational gain.
Therefore I am working currently on learning how to position my children to learn that they are never again to allow themselves to be used without profit.
I hope to teach them to never again be caught in the exploitative web of religious and/or political communities.
The best missionaries, I now understand, have learned to deeply value all, and have learned to allow the beings whom they seek to help, to lead, and to value that leadership. They learn how to be partners instead of assuming that they are teachers.
Such relationships are not fraught with anxiety. There is great peace and profit in knowing that things do not have to be as we typically experience or as we expect them to be in order to be good.
When we get to this place we truly experience peace as we recognize that we are a world full of nothing but heroes, who function best as ourselves in community with each other.
And we learn to see all of us as missionaries, people on a mission, including and not limited to our roles in the lives of those closest to us, so as parents, teachers, partners, and friends etc.
When we accept this definition of being we will finally function as equals. And there we will finally be at peace.
As I live, I keep seeing systems being built to fix issues in systems, and I see new systems being effectively the same as the systems that needed to be fixed.
I realized this as I was doing it. I had to heal from the wounds of the systems that caused me pain because though I did not enjoy the wounds, what I knew of working for good was learned from the infected systems. I was infected. I am infected. I needed to learn a different model from a healthier source.
So I stopped building a system, and started living with real people.
I looked around and understood why I needed to consistently judge my thoughts.
And one day in the midst of that period after I stopped, I got dressed to go to a worship gathering in a weird green dress.
It was an interesting dress that grabbed my attention when I first saw it. Then it arrived and I thought what in the actual hell is this.
So I tried it on, and thought ewww. Fail.
Priya and I looked at it, and looked at me in it and we had such a great laugh.
Somewhere in our laughter we thought that maybe it might be different when accessorized. I put it away.
Rest, weird dress.
Then one Saturday morning shortly after the night of our big laugh I awoke with a clear knowing that I needed to get to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church (SDA) in the area. I was in Alberta, didn’t know the area, and hadn’t been to an SDA church in quite some time. So I called the one that I knew in a town further away. Getting there seemed out of reach.
I knew that I needed to go, and I had been learning to listen to what I know. So I persevered in getting there by asking the people around me if they knew of a way. There was no transit in, and no Uber out.
It turned out that there was an SDA church right close by. That is where I needed to be. So I began to get ready, and that weird dress began to say “HEY! I am for this.”
For some reason, maybe my listening is improving, I agreed to give her a shot. Weird Dress was right. She was for this.
As soon as I put her on, I realized that I was going to wear her again twice that same weekend as a part of a learning experience about how much more alike we are than different, and how unique and appropriately wonderful our differences were.
Weird Dress on me, and I in her, or is it I in she, set out on the first part of our adventure.
We arrived, as usual, in perfect time. Other people around us had been worried and stressed that we were going to be late – even though they weren’t even coming with us.
Weird Dress and I knew better. We were always perfectly on time, because we had been doing lots of work around releasing stressful ideas related to time.
And what a day it turned out to be. We met an Uber driver who taught us a LOT in ten minutes about boundaries. We needed that. He told us a story about a time when he had done what he said he would do, and how that went up to ten years later when someone tried to get him to do more. He said no. Simple. And then he looked at the situation and saw an area where he did need to say yes, and he did that. Thanks, Bob. I’m saying thanks now, and I have already said thank you to Bob in person for teaching me so much in ten minutes. I think Bob thought I was weird. 🤷🏾♀️ I don’t know. I’m probably wrong about that.
Anyway. So we arrived right in perfect time, Weird Dress and I. We heard a sermon that included an illustration which brought rivers of tears of joy and hope, and affirmation running out of me. It was important that this happened in a Seventh-Day Adventist church.
I’d grown up in the SDA religious community, and although I had come to see the value of some beautiful connections with people, I was very angry, hurt, and disappointed by the systemic Adventist experience. And I chose about a year ago to fully withdraw from membership with the denomination – from the system, not from the people.
Listening to that sermon which was full of things with which I disagreed and found harmful, AND also full of ideas and heartfulls of joy and light that were perfectly in tune with the encouragement that my soul needed that day was WONDERFUL.
Finish strong: even though we’ve been hurt, wounded, in pain, we can finish strong, especially if we do it together.
One of the biggest joys of my life has been releasing the stress attached to rightness and owning truth. We are a whole world of wheat and tares. The balance of wheat and tares differs in different places, and there’s a reason for that. We don’t understand the reasons. We just see the tares, and our instinct is to pull them up ourselves. Jesus said not to do this.
Jesus told us to wait until the right time, until the harvest. And harvest time differs for each one of us, and for each system.
We can, in our own minds, accept the existence of tares and figure out once we get to acceptance, how to exist with tares until the harvest, in ourselves, in others, and in systems. I’m finding this part to be my biggest challenge. I’m approaching conscious competence in this though. I am grateful.
So Weird Dress and I celebrated the gifts of connection that we received that day. We shared tears and prayers with the speaker, and we talked about how we have hope for change.
It was another healing day.
And it was so perfect that the end of that experience was a conversation in a washroom with two preteen Princess best friends who decided by the end of our conversation that they could be princesses who loved sports and other fun things, AND they agreed that they would talk to each other about disagreements with hope throughout their friendship.
Princess 1 began our conversation by complimenting me on how awesome I looked. Way to go Weird Dress. We rocked it.
Two SDA washrooms were a huge source of healing for me on that trip. It’s amazing that both times I had that experience because I decided to live as myself, embracing my bladder’s needs. Are we veering into TMI? Nah. It’s good.
The second experience was in a Burman University washroom where messages around consent and rape are placed in stalls in the women’s washroom. I don’t yet have the words to share about the powerful healing that happened for me in that space. The tears of power that have slowly begun to fall from the corner of my eyes as I write about that moment is all I can share of it. I am deeply grateful.
Weird Dress and I went to two other services at two other buildings with two different religious groups of different denominations that weekend. Each time we accessorized slightly differently in celebration of how much we are the same, with small differences.
All three experiences were wonderful. Each touched my heart and healed a bit more of my soul in connection with others.
It’s likely that nothing is as weird as we think it is. It is also good to know that where there is harm there can be healing and hope.
So I’m trying to learn to leave the tares for God, all three, to uproot at the harvest, and instead I am working on sharing my heart and my story, and whatever messages our God inspires me to share, as a part of our process of finishing strong, together.
Thanks for being on that journey with me Weird Dress. It’s so cool that because I paused to take a second look, I actually love you.
On the way to the SDA Worship gathering At the Home Church worship gathering Ready for the Crossroads Church worship gatheringPastor and Mrs. “Finish Strong” 💚Princess Warrior Sporty Best Friends
Sometimes we wonder about the difference between adult siblings who were raised as childen in the same household. Hold this image in mind when that judgment arises.
One plant, in its position, benefits from the rain, the other does not. The plants don’t know this.
Similarly, in our relational systems, we often do not understand the difference in ourselves, because as we fight to live we just don’t know what we don’t know. This is why it is majorly important to consciously purge shame from our world.
We shame each other and ourselves when we live with judgment against people, instead of being open to judging our thoughts for self and for each other.
I believe that this process of judging thoughts becomes so much more powerful when we can do it together, with faith in the process, and with warmth and lovingkindness for each other.
Life is life. When we know better we do better without fail. Always. No exceptions.
What we know varies in ways that we don’t understand, so just be kind. Give a little water when we see that water is needed, and do that with love, without shame.
It may take some work to release the shame. Do the work.
It is worth it. These plants won’t learn how to find food and water themselves, and as humans we can learn how to consciously do our best at nourishing our hearts.
Here are the same plants, one day, and a little water later.
Being compassionate, open, inclusive, and shame-free is 100% always worth it.
In my favourite spot; at my favourite place, being with My Love, and you.
It had been a while since I had the space and taken the time to be in solitude to gather myself. I needed this.
The world is at war. People are dying, while breathing day by day, and with no more breath, and I am feeling it all, and speaking up as needed, even though my inner critical monster, whom I have named C-Yu, tries, now in vain, to silence me.
C-Yu has a name because I refuse to be haunted by a phantom. They have been brought into the light, and they’ll stay there until My Love declares with me, “It is finished. Peace, be still.”
C-Yu uses the eyes of those precious to me in the stories that I tell myself about our connection. And so speaking in the face of the stories, with C-Yu’s piercing glare doing its best to stop love from piercing through the darkness of shame, has cost me a lot. It’s a price that I am willing to pay though, because I know that the cost is an illusion. All is well. And it still hurts.
Shalom until faith becomes sight for you and for me. All is well.
Nurturing Kindred 