Enough is Enough

Our preacher brought us a great sermon yesterday. He called it “Enough is Enough.” It was based on the woman who secretly touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was healed. One of the pictures associated with today’s blog is a powerful mural of that scene from Mark 5. The picture is on a wall of a chapel in Magdala, Galilee. Richard verbally painted the picture of this woman who had been bleeding for 12 years. She had spent all her money and had “suffered much” from the doctors she had asked for help. She had done everything she knew to do, and nothing had worked. There was nowhere else to turn, so she turned to Jesus. She had had enough!

Richard went on to talk of the ways in which our lives might lead us to a place where we have had enough – in relationships, in job loss, in isolation because of COVID, in fighting some addiction. And he said that should tell us we need to turn to Jesus. When you have tried everything else and nothing is working, turn to Jesus. Jesus has been there all the time, waiting for you to turn to Him.

But there is more. On Saturday, Richard and Charlene and I and many others had spent the day on our laptops with the Minneapolis Racial Leadership Virtual Summit called “Treating the Root of Racism.” It was sponsored by the Carl Spain Center out of Abilene University and hosted by Dr. Russell Pointer and the Minneapolis Central Church of Christ. It was a great presentation, calmly and respectfully presented. It included panels on topics like “White Rage” and “Black Rage” and the various speakers reviewed several important books. They suggested what our responsibilities are at this time. In his message Sunday morning, Richard drew the parallel between the Galilean woman with the issue of blood and Black people having reached their limit – both have had enough. Watching the officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck exceeded their limit. Like the woman who had had "enough," they had too.

The End of Our Republic?

What an adversarial people we have become, at least as it appears in the media. Both the formal media, like news networks, and the informal media, like the various varieties of social media, are constantly presenting one side or another (or both sides) of an argument. To quote an old friend, “It makes me tired.” It doesn’t have to be that way.

There are people closely watching every expression of an opinion or statement of fact, waiting for something they can characterize as something awful. My hope for each of you is that you are a member of some group that doesn’t treat you that way. I pray that each of you has some people in your life that will truly listen with interest to what you have to say and will offer an alternative way of looking at something without putting you down or making you look or feel stupid.

I am sure the near-by date of the national elections plays a large part. Each side seems to be looking for the other side to say or do something they can cast as evil. The local ads are in some ways worse than the national ones. If you have been paying any attention to local politics, I am sure you can spot some of the ads that are taking actions that were well intended by the other person and presenting them as a total betrayal of the constituency.

It is more on my mind, I am sure, because we have just recently started watching the local news on TV and it is interspersed with election ads. When I wasn’t seeing it, I wasn’t as concerned. I am sure there is a good sermon in there somewhere.

The title of this post comes from some of the current national political commentary. “The other side, if elected, will bring an end to our republic.”  Both sides are saying or implying such. They are trying to outdo each other with who can use the most hyperbolic rhetoric to characterize the other guys.

I like one side better than the other, but the other guys are not always wrong (Gasp!). The designers of our republic had at least one thing right – building in the checks and balances of the three parts of government. I think we will be here awhile yet. Despite what you might hear on the news, the American people are resilient. We will eventually come out in the right place. Meanwhile, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” And may God bless America! If He does, we don’t need to worry about all these politicians.

I Saw Daddy Angry Three Times

 

I always called my father “Daddy” until Charlene and her clan came along. Even before that, others were referring to him as “Daddy May.” When Winnie joined our little group as Cecil’s bride, she called Daddy “Daddy May” – a natural extension of Cecil’s “Daddy.” When Daucie’s offspring became a part of our family, they picked up on Winnie’s name for our beloved “founder of the feast.”

I have always felt a certain proprietorship toward Daddy May. From the time I was eight until I was sixteen, it was just him and me. There are a lot of good stories from that time-period, but not for today. This morning I was reminded of one time he got angry.

It is hard to imagine him angry. He was as even tempered a man as I have ever known or heard of. But this event broke through. His barber shop proudly displayed a “Union Shop” sign. I never talked with him about the pros and cons of being a Union Shop but one of the cons was that the union set the hair cut prices. It was a slow time for barbers and probably for a lot of other small businesses. The union’s answer to the decrease in the number of haircuts was to raise the prices. That did not fit with Daddy’s sense of economics. They raised the price of a haircut to $1.00. Daddy thought that would keep even more people away or at least cause them to spread out the time between haircuts. He was probably right, but he still had no control over what the union told him he had to do. He was “hopping mad.”

That reminded me of two other times Daddy got angry. My little black Cocker mix, Bobo, was my best friend at the time. He even appears on the cover of one of my books today. I don’t know what got into the dog, probably confusion over my mother’s abrupt departure from our home and Bobo being left in the house alone during the day. My daddy and I returned to the house one evening to discover that Bobo had chewed up one of my socks. Daddy flashed hot and declared that we would get rid of the dog. Arguing with Daddy was not in my repertoire, so I did the only thing I knew how to do - I cried. Then Daddy cried, and we held on to each other for a while. Nothing was said of mother’s departure, but we both knew we were really crying about that. In the end, Daddy repented and said we would keep the dog.

I was younger than that on the third occasion I remember Daddy getting mad and this time he was mad at me. The 1000 member Union Avenue Church was renovating its auditorium. There was no where else for 1000 people to go on a Sunday morning, so we continued to meet during the renovation. We never sat in the balcony, but something about the progress of the work caused us to move up there. The workers had stored some 2x4’s along the space in front of our row of seats. I am thinking I was four or five and my feet did not reach the floor. The only place for me to rest my feet was on the stacked lumber. Every time I moved, the lumber shifted and made a loud clatter. I was fairly warned not to make that noise any more, probably at least twice. On the third time my daddy got up, took me by the hand and marched me to the basement where he gave me the only spanking I remember ever getting from anyone. This may sound a little odd, but I still believe the only spanking I ever got was unfairly administered.

These are not memories I think of often and are not how I think of my daddy. He was the best daddy any little boy or free-range teenager could have ever asked for - at a time when single fathers were not in vogue. The reason I do remember these events is how dramatically out of character they were.

Why Can’t We All Be Friends?

A few days ago, I published a statement something like “Why can’t we all be friends?” I got a little push back on it, something about White supremacy, I think.

There are a couple of blogs in here about stereotyping and I won’t repeat that here, but the tendency to stereotype people contributes heavily to our inability to be friends. White people will approach a Black man as if he represented everything the White person ever heard or believed about “Black people.” Likewise, a Black person approaching a White person. Some would have you believe that all White people are white supremacists, or that all Black people are violent.

If you know of some Democrats who have lied about something, that doesn’t make all Democrats liars. Same for Republicans. If there are cops who are abusive toward Black people, it doesn’t mean Cops are all racists. If some Black Lives Matter advocates have looted and burned stores, it doesn’t mean Black Lives Matters supporters are all rioters.

Our granddaughter Rachel loves to call her Granny on her new phone and talk on and on about whatever. Yesterday Granny couldn’t talk so Rachel called me. We got to reminiscing about a song we once learned together awhile back. I was teaching some older teens how to lead songs in our a Capella group. One of the things I needed them to understand was that if you are going to lead singing regularly, you need to be able to make a fool of yourself and just plow on, unaffected. Toward that end we all performed “All God’s Creatures Got a Place in The Choir” for the rest of the church after services one Sunday morning. We all made fools of ourselves and considering that done, we would not be embarrassed by mistakes we might make as we led the singing for the church.

The song, “All God’s Creatures…”, has a message very similar to one presented in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 where Paul writes that we are all a part of the body, yet we are all different. We all have different roles. We can no more get along without one member than a body could easily go on without a hand or an eye.

“All God’s creatures got a place in the choir,
Some sing low, some sing higher,
Some sing out loud on the telephone wire,
Some just clap their hands, or paws or anything they got there.”

 Why can’t we all be friends?