Enough with all the hatred!

Actions speak louder than words

Rick Moran brings us this photo taken in South Carolina. A state trooper helps

an elderly neo-Nazi wearing a shirt with a swastika on it, who was apparently overcome by the heat, up the stairs of the statehouse.

The man was attending a KKK rally. At the same time there was a rally connected with the New Black Panther party. The two groups yelled at each other, while their free speech was protected by the troopers. Read more here.

Gender is not enough

Lesley Leyland Fields writes,

A man or woman, a boy or girl who tends toward the features considered “the other” may question his or her identity in a way that may not have happened a few decades ago.

It seems to me that men are hit particularly hard on this, from two directions. Women and girls enjoy a generous allowance that encourages the athlete, the supermodel, the CEO and the mother as equally valid expressions of femaleness. Many parents, like me, encourage our daughters to be pitchers and point guards (and fishermen) rather than princesses. But cultural expectations of masculinity are far more stingy. If a man is gentle, compassionate, artsy, empathetic, cultivates beauty in his life, talks with his hands, enjoys the friendship of women, his masculinity and sexuality is instantly questioned.

Nor are the stereotypes themselves gender equitable. After suffering generations of sexism, women fare much better than men under the current spotlight. Women are lauded for their neural plasticity; are seen as flexible, cooperative, compassionate, honest. Women outpace men in higher education, in employability, and in a score of other measures. And at the movies, they’re as glamorous and sexy as ever but they’re also Avengers, superheroes, as kick-ass as the men. Angelina Jolie, all 100 pounds of her, can flick a 300 pound villain over her gorgeous head. Women can do and be it all.

And men? Yes, athletes and superheroes, but not much else. They’ve been lame pathetic fathers in sitcoms for more than 20 years. The moral failures of male politicians has come to feel like the norm. Physiologically, men are critiqued for their single-lobed rigidity, for their lone-wolf leadership style, leading one social observer, Hanna Rosen, to her 2010 provocative cover story for The Atlantic, The End of Men. In my day, many girls wanted to be boys, myself included because the boys held all the power. No longer. Now it is men who want to be women: three times as many men as women are undergoing sex reassignment surgery.

I’m not explaining away Jenner’s transformation on the media-ized ascendency of women in our time, though it may be a contributing factor. That double image of Bruce and then Caitlyn is a fitting poster for the increasing gap between the genders. But even more than this, Jenner’s interview and his Vanity Fair coverage poignantly highlights that our sexualized obsession with gender is failing us.



This is my hope, that whoever we are, we will be known not for our gender category but for our mercy, our wisdom, our kindness, our humility, our grace, and our love. If we allow the Holy Spirit to do this in us, we will be exactly who we were created to be, inside and out.

Read more here.

Something different

Thanks to Ann Voskamp for posting this video

"Father forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing."

Do you have a parent or child you haven't talked to in years? How can we see them through eyes of mercy and kindness? Is it too late to connect or reconnect?

Is it possible that someone is there on the other side of the road, someone like you, stripped, knocked out, unable even to ask for help? Might that person be wounded also?

Consider the words of Jesus on the cross as He struggled for breath, His body so bloodied He was unrecognizable. He had done no evil, no wrong at all, ever.

Yet He was executed as a criminal. Jesus hung there, pinioned like a dove, and uttered the most startling words ever: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

Christmas at the big box store

Christmas shopping has been intense at the big box store in the affluent suburban community where I live and work. You get to know a little bit about a lot of people, when working as a cashier. I'll share a couple of stories here.

Yesterday was not the day for well organized people to come shopping. Frantic is the word I'm looking for. One exasperated woman was stressing more and more as each item was scanned. When I told her the total, she let fly with an expletive, because she was $34 short. The man next in line picked up the shortfall. Then he started to worry. He asked if his credit card number was on the receipt. She said no, just the last four digits. I assured him that was the case, so he breathed a sigh of relief.

One of the things I really like about the store is that it attracts customers from all income groups, and they come from a considerable distance to shop there. Poor people drive long distances to get away from the crime-ridden neighborhoods where their closest big box stores are located. Rural people drive hours to shop at the store where I work.

One couple always makes me chuckle. He is a ranch hand named Mike with a deep drawl, as his native state is Mississippi. As soon as he sees me in the store, no matter how far away he is from my cash register, he just can't contain his enthusiasm, and yells out a long drawn out "Baahbb!"

His new bride is from Minnesota. They really love each other. She is a big improvement from his last mate, who kept getting arrested and thrown in jail for driving without a license. His new bride had a rough December. She was fired from her job at the Salvation Army store, where she worked hanging clothes on the racks. A customer was rude to her, and as he was leaving the store, she gave him the finger, and a fellow employee tattled on her.

She was in good spirits yesterday, though, because she was able to save enough money ($300) before getting fired to buy a "new" truck for her husband as a combination birthday and Christmas present. Their Toyota was falling apart. She bought him a 1995 Ford pickup with "only" 260,000 miles on it. It has a stereo that not only works, but even tells you the name of the singer or musician who is playing!

The other reason she was in such good spirits yesterday was she found a doctor who accepts Medicaid. He is a "very nice man, and young, too!" Now she can get all her prescriptions filled that she hasn't been able to fill since moving to Colorado three months ago after marrying Mike. From her mood yesterday, I'm guessing she already got her medications.

Getting married in order to fall in love

Russ Ramsey writes,

The Puritans used to say you got married in order to fall in love. They reasoned: How can a man and woman possibly hope to know the wonder, joy, and depth of real love—the kind where you are truly known and truly loved at the same time—without making those two lives into one thing?

Traumatic situations don’t create a person’s character so much as they expose what’s already there. Silence a man’s inner dialog and take away the filter through which he runs what he chooses to say and what he keeps inside, and what comes out of him will likely fall closer to the truth than to fiction. If this is true, then it is in me to belittle kindness and glare at beauty. It is in me to tell the ones who love me most to go away. It is in me to reject the advances of grace. And it is true. I know it is.

There in my brokenness I had so little to give. But grace, she never left. She met me in all my frailty, raw and wrathful, as exposed and defenseless as the day I was born. There she stayed, tending to me with kindness and mercy, weeping both for her sorrow and mine while I slept, in a chair scooted up next to my bed so that she could lay her head by my side because she loved me.

Thanks to Ann Voskamp for linking to this post by Mr. Ramsey.