Judgment Day

We’ve all heard the story before.  When you die, you’ll go up to the pearly gates and God (or somebody) will discuss your life with you.  You’ll look at the good deeds and bad as well as the various religious decisions you made.  At the end you’ll be given your sentence: Heaven or Hell.  OK, so I don’t know if this is how it really goes.  I suppose it’s in The Bible somewhere but I’ll admit to never actually reading about it, that I can remember.  I’m sure there is some variation of this story in each religion.  I mean without Judgment Day how in the world will we control the masses?  Of course I also think it has to be more than just an issue of control.  If so many people and organizations believe some version of it, then some version of it is probably true.

Today, I’m going to share with you my version.  Over the years I’ve read a lot of spiritual and woo-woo books that have helped me formulate this idea.  I do believe there is a Judgment Day, but the person doing the judging is us or rather the divine part of us.  I believe that before entering our bodies and lives we create a contract.  We have various challenges we must work through and qualities we must work with.  I think we make pacts with other souls to help us meet our goals.  If there is someone in your life who presses your buttons, you better believe it’s in their contract to do that.

With that being said I believe that when we die our souls leave our body and ascend to the other side (Heaven if you’d like).  Once there we are greeted by a soulmate-spirit guide, angel, or deceased loved one-who leads us to our life review.  During this life review we see and experience everything we did in our human life at a whole other level.  (Does the phrase “my life flashed before my eyes” ring a bell?)   We feel the pain we caused others as well as the joy.  We understand at a deep level what affect our decisions had on the world around us.

When the review is over we evaluate ourselves and how successful we were at achieving the goals set forth in our contract.  In some cases we may have reached the level intended and can ascend to the next Heavenly stage.  In other cases we see that we still have much to learn and after some rest we get started on planning another life on Earth-which some might consider Hell.

What I believe is that our souls are of God.  That is the image and likeness within us.  When we emerge into life it is God’s wish to experience the realm of humanity.  The devil we encounter in this human world is that of free will or ego.  It is the gift we are given by God to learn,  make choices, and live.  We cannot truly experience anything unless we have felt it’s polar opposite.  So we are both God (soul) and the Devil (ego, free will).

At the end of our life we will be judged, but not by any man in the sky.  We will experience and judge our own experiences, based on what God intended for us to give and take from this life.  The only Hell we can possibly experience is that of leaving Heaven and our limitless form to return to a body on Earth.

So, that’s my take on Judgment Day.  If it feels good to you take it as your own, if not please leave it behind and find what feels like truth to you.  We are all on our own paths and must search within ourselves for the answers to these questions.  This is just an answer that makes sense to me.

 

Why My Daughter May Fear Jesus

My Unity church is a small one.  We don’t have a big children’s program so for that reason my youngest daughter, Callee, is almost five but still a “nursery kid.”  Her age group doesn’t yet get spiritual instruction.  Up until September she hadn’t really been introduced to Jesus.  (In our house we pray to God or Spirit not to Jesus.)

In September we (Callee and I) went to NC for my grandmother’s funeral.  In the days leading up to her death, Mema had a vision of Jesus.  It was a given that when she finally passed everyone talked about that vision.  Jesus had come to take her home.

Before the funeral, the family went to privately view Mema’s body.  I really didn’t want to take Callee into the room.  I didn’t think she would understand.  I thought it might scare her or scar her.  In the end, the confusion scared her more.  There was a mysterious room where people walked into and then started weeping.  My brother-in-law did his best to distract her, but ultimately I decided she needed to see what was going on.

When we showed Callee Mema’s body it was explained to her that now Mema was with Jesus in Heaven.  I did not realize then how seriously she was filing that statement away.

It has been two months since the funeral and pretty often Callee still mentions, out of the blue, that Mema is with Jesus.  The other day though she said something that made me realize that this particular way of explaining death to her may have been a mistake.  We had stopped to check the mail when Callee stepped in a huge fire ant nest while wearing flip flops.  She ended up getting eleven ant bites.  When we got in the house she sat down and was furiously scratching the bites.  While doing this she said in her meanest voice “I wish all the fire ants in the world would just go with Jesus to Heaven.”

On one hand, I wanted to crack up laughing but on the other hand, it made me sad.  Now my little girl equates Jesus with dying.  I’m realizing now that although it wouldn’t have been as sweet, it would have been much more productive to have just told her that Mema had died.

With this in mind I just have to hope that she doesn’t come in contact with someone trying to evangelize to her.  The moment they ask her if she wants to have Jesus in her heart she’s likely to wonder if it’s some kind of death threat!

Learning From Loss

Today is October 25, 2010.  Last year on this day I experienced the first real loss of my life…the death of one of my best friends.  It was a loss that came out of no where and taught me a lesson in uncertainty.  There are deaths that you prepare yourself for (or at least as much as your imagination will allow you to prepare).  In adulthood, as your parents and grandparents age, you watch their health carefully and become more aware of their mortality.   When people you love get serious illnesses (such as cancer), as much as you want them to overcome, you realistically know anything could happen.  BUT you never expect that a young mother could deliver her twin babies on a Friday and die unexpectedly on Sunday.  Amy was the picture of health, finally embarking on the journey of motherhood she’d longed for.  I had plans for Amy… so many of us had plans for her.

This weekend, I was reading the book “Embracing Uncertainty” by Susan Jeffers, Ph.D.  Amy was on my mind as I started the chapter called “Embracing the Learning.”  In the chapter she talks about how everything is a learning experience and the key is to remember this fact during the bad times and the good times.  She included an exercise where you make a statement and follow it with the phrase “I can learn from this.”  She gave these first two vague examples:

“I lost my job…………I can learn from this.”

“I lost my relationship……………I can learn from this.”

The next example she gave was this:

“My best friend died……………I can learn from this.”

That last example was so specific that it felt like it was just for me.  I’d randomly picked this book off the shelf at the library and just happened to have started reading it the weekend of the anniversary of Amy’s death.

So what have I learned from my best friend’s death?

I learned that there are no guarantees in life and just because you make plans doesn’t mean they will come to fruition.  You have to let go of expectations because clinging to them only causes suffering.  I learned that my husband is the best thing that ever happened to me and I want to spend as much time as I am given making sure he knows that.  I was reminded that experiences are better than stuff.  The memories I have of the fun and love-filled times with Amy mean so much more to me than anything I could have (whether related to Amy or not).  I learned that I want to live life to the fullest because again there are no guarantees.

As I make the list of things that I learned I realize that time has shifted my energy.  The only thing good about experiencing such a shattered heart is that it has to remain open for a time.  When your heart is open, you feel more and can really live those lessons.  They permeate you (or can if you let them).  But over time the wound closes and you don’t always remember what you knew in the fragile moments.  Although I often think of how amazing and important my husband is, I don’t tell him nearly enough.  I’ve gone back to making plans and hoping, praying, clinging to outcomes.  Over the past months I’ve thought about the future far too often, instead of being present and full.

So on this anniversary, I will spend the day living fully, experiencing life, and possibly making memories to cherish.  I will tell my husband and my daughters how much I love them now.  I will wonder about our future but I will also embrace the uncertainty of it all.

Jase’s Click

Jase is one of the very first friends I made through the blog world and Twitter.  I connected with him and his then fiance Traci.  We read and commented regularly on each other’s blogs.  Jase and Traci were both very supportive when Amy passed away.  Sadly enough I got to return the favor and offer what I could (an ear to listen) when Jase lost Traci last December.  I am so honored and grateful to have Jase here sharing the story of his loss, grief, and the healing he has found through love.  He has included both of his blog addresses here so you can find those if you’d like to read more from him.

A click, a loss and the aftermath …

Early in 2009 I was given a second chance by my then girlfriend.

The quick backstory is I’d cheated on her, but it wasn’t just the matter of me cheating. The truth is I’d been a cheater for years. I cheated on my first wife. I cheated on the people I was cheating with. And after finding Traci and falling in love with her, I cheated on her. I was a serial cheater and looked everywhere for an explanation … or so I thought.

In late 2008 we separated, I moved out and not long after that I realized I was throwing away a pretty incredible relationship. And, admitting that to her, I fought hard to win her back, but she told me no. Repeatedly.

She told me I needed to change.

And over time, through honesty, hard work and determination, I did, and she was willing to take me back.

My click came during a gut-wrenching phone call made to my parents. Specifically I called to ask for advice from my father before I moved back home to Traci. I was in tears, frantic, scared.

During the course of our conversation he told me that the choices I make are mine, and that he and mom would support any decision I made. He told me he could tell me what to do, but wouldn’t, because the burden of that choice, good or bad, would be his, and not mine. He also told me that I needed to live up to and honor whatever choice I made.

I don’t remember his exact words, but they were something like this.

“You need to stop messing around. You’re not a kid anymore, there’s no status in what you’re doing. If you don’t stop it, you’re going to grow up to be a bitter, lonely old man.”

He went on.

“Your mother and I have had our share of problems. We’ve fought like crazy. But I honored her each night by walking in that door. I may not have wanted to walk in it, but I did it every night. You need to do that.”

My dad’s an emotional guy as it is, but as he said this he was choked up and I knew he was crying.

His words cut to my core. They weren’t spoken in anger or as an admonishment. They were spoken in a somber, gentle tone, almost like a request … like one last lifeline he had to throw out to his son.

Through meditation I’d already begun to change, but hearing my father’s words, the emotion in his voice, the anguish both he and my mother expressed over the phone, it finally clicked.

I cheated because I was immature and selfish. I’d looked everywhere for an explanation for my behavior except for the one place that mattered … myself. My choices were completely within my control and I needed to stop looking outside of myself for an explanation and own up to it and take responsibility for my actions.

I vowed, from that moment on, to clean up, to honor Traci and honor our relationship. And I did. From that moment on, the beginning of April 2009, I was faithful in word, thought and deed.

Our relationship bloomed again. We reconnected. We made wedding plans for January 2010. There were challenges, but we fought through them together. We had an amazing eight months.

Yes, I say had.

On December 10, 2009, moments before she was to meet me for our commute home together, there was an accident. I frantically texted her, called her, hoping to hear her voice and find that she was ok.

She never answered.

In a moment, a heartbeat, I’d lost everything I’d fought so hard to get back.

I’d never again kiss the woman I’d kissed goodbye that morning. I’d never feel her head on my shoulder. I’d never feel her hand in mine.

I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

The plans we’d made, the hopes we’d shared, the dreams we’d dreamed together … were gone.

I could write thousands of words and I’m not sure I could convey the depth of my loss. My wish is that none of you would ever have to endure it.

In the weeks that followed I realized I had a choice (As an aside, I’m not trying to minimize what I went through … in the interest of space and the time, I’m condensing things quite a bit. If you’d like to read more about my journey you can visit my blog – hopeintheaftermath.wordpress.com).

I could wallow in my grief, cloak myself in my loss and be a victim. Or I could do my best to pick up the pieces and move on.

Or, as I told someone at the time, “I could either own this, or it could own me.”

Which goes back to my click.

It came down to me being responsible for how I dealt with the loss. I could throw away all the progress I’d made, all the positive changes I’d made, and return to old ways and self-destructive habits.

Or, I could take the lessons I learned on my own, and the lessons that Traci taught me, and I could choose to take the hard way out, to fight to see the positive when everything was bleak. I could choose to be as strong as I could at any given moment, understanding my limitations, and be the dad and man I needed to be.

I could choose, simply put, to live. Another click.

And as I looked at it, I saw no better way to honor Traci’s memory, and what she taught me, and the relationship we had, than to live the life I’d fought so hard to rebuild.

So I made that choice … and some days were better than others. Some days my grief was debilitating. Some days I managed to laugh and smile. Some days I just did what I could to get through the day.

But I didn’t give up.

Winter gave way to Spring and in early May, while on Facebook, I came across the name of an old high school sweetheart. I’d not seen her, heard from her or really even thought of her since we were kids – 22 years ago.

But I sent Ketra a friend request and a message, just wondering how she’d been, what she was doing.

As it turned out, her life was in roughly the same place as mine, though for different reasons. So we began to talk … innocently at first. But the more we talked, the more we both knew something bigger than we’d expected was happening.

We ended up sharing our complete stories, the good, the bad, the ugly … as I put it, warts and all. There was no holding back. There were no walls. Just two people – who for so long hid behind walls and other means of protecting themselves – being vulnerable.

She invited me out to see her in San Diego. I accepted and we planned a June visit. As May gave into June we realized we’d fallen for each other, again, and the visit would be more than just two old friends hanging out.

We talked a lot about where we’d been and what we’d gone through. I told her a lot of the things I’ve written here, the bad, and the good. She did the same for me.

And that weekend, in the desert, with the winds blowing through the palms as we sat and talked for hours, we began to talk about forever. In the dark I took her hand and I asked her to marry me.

And she said yes.

She showed me faith and trust, and my father’s words still rung in my ear … “…I honored her each night by walking in that door…”

As I write this, Ketra is days away from moving back home to me, and to walking into the door that is the gateway to our home.

And I come back to my click moment.

Sometimes I wonder, fearfully, where I would be were it not for my click?

Had I not changed, would I have been able to survive the loss that I experienced?

Had I not honored Traci for the last eight months we were together, would the guilt, literally, have killed me?

Had I not grown up, and finally become a man, would Ketra have responded to me? Would she have opened up to me? Would she have let me in?

Would we be together, on the verge of forever?

Obviously these are rhetorical questions … but I think I know the answers to all of them regardless.

And thankfully, I know the key to making sure the relationship we have is the relationship we want.

It’s the key called honor that fits in the door to “our home” … and it’s one I’ll gladly turn and walk through each night, from now until our days are done.

Thank you dad … for helping me find my click. I love you.

Note: I’ve mothballed the blog I mentioned earlier. Not that my “journey through loss” is ever going to be over, but my life is about more than just that journey now. If you’d like to read more about my life, my family and whatever else comes to mind, visit our new family blog, theedgeoftheearth.wordpress.com

None of us Really Know…Do We?

I just finished reading the book Silence of the Heart by Paul Ferrini.  It talked a lot, like most of the spiritual books I read, about the inward journey being the place where you find your truth.  All of the outward stuff just forces us, if we wise up, to ask those inward questions.  When we bump up against something and it makes us go “OWIEEEEE!” we ought to ask ourselves why.  That is where we get real answers.  That is how we move forward on our unique path to enlightenment.

I went to my grandmother’s funeral a few weeks ago.  She was a wonderful woman, who lived a long life and had a lot of experiences.  I went to the service hoping to cry and laugh at the stories told about her.   But I also knew since she attended a baptist church the sermon would go hand in hand with the celebration of her life.

It’s been a long time since I’ve attended a church like that.  I got bumped…big time.  In a way I thought maybe I’d conjured up and exaggerated the message, that maybe it was bitterness that caused me to remember only one particular aspect.  But no.  The only message I took a way from Mema’s funeral sermon was:

If people don’t ask Jesus into their hearts they are doomed to Hell.  It doesn’t matter how good they are, all that matters is they allow Jesus to save them.  All the other religions are wrong…end of discussion.  And since Mema had Jesus in her heart, the only way to see her again is to take Jesus into your heart.

I was squirming in my seat.  My stomach was doing flips.  A lump was forming in my throat.  I wanted to scream.  I wanted to run.  That is how I felt as I listened to the minister speak.  That is what I felt as I was supposed to be honoring my grandmother’s life.

So why did it bug me?  Why does this particular bump hurt so badly time and time again?  First off, this is my family’s religion.  This is their way of life.  For a girl who did her best to be pleasing (although I’m sure some might argue this), it really sucks to know that your family’s religion and beliefs tell them over and over that all the good I’ve done amounts to nothing.  I can spend years teaching inner city school children and serving food at the homeless shelter but I’m still going to burn in Hell with the worst of them.  In the end it only really matters that I’m on the right team.  And I’m not.  In ways I wish I could go back but I would be deceiving everyone if I did.

Which brings me to my next point.  There are so many people I want to shake and say “don’t you see how much of this life, this moment, this world you are missing out on by living a dream.”  We build up walls between us and our brothers and our sisters, so that we can stake claim to some plot of land in the afterlife that may or may not exist.  I am as convinced that they are wrong as the minister and his congregants are convinced they are right.  So I have built my own walls.  I have chosen to love my brothers and sisters less.  I’ve been prideful and smug.  I’m no different than the man that smiled and told a roomful of mourners that unless they followed his ideas they would suffer in a fiery Hell forever.

The truth is we don’t know.  None of us actually know what happens when we die.  We don’t actually know if there is a God.  We take it by faith.  We look at our own personal life experience and if we see something that appears as God there we make a choice to believe.  The books we read are all just experiences shared by other people just like us.  It is not my place to tell you where or how you should find God.  It is not my place to tell you that your God is not the right God.  I should simply love you for having the courage to seek at all.  And I hope to be loved for those reasons as well.

Momomatic’s Click

I “met” Momomatic through @Whyisdaddycryin.  He mentioned her and her kick-ass blog enough that I followed her on Twitter and read her blog after she returned from hiatus.  She is pretty awesome and I am so honored that she agreed to write a click story for me.  If you’d like to read more from her you can follow her on Twitter here and read her blog here.

Waiting For The Click By Momomatic

I am largely pregnant and sitting uncomfortably in a scratchy gray office chair. I stare at the phone willing it not to ring. It rings. I learn that I am one of the many people that will be laid off from the company I work at. We were told to sit at our desks and HR would call those of us that would be let go. Presumably so we could sweat it out in private, behind closed doors. Mostly so the CEO wouldn’t have to look any of us in the eye.

I breathe in and out and tell myself we will be fine. There is no maternity leave now and we will have to figure out how to get by on unemployment. But we can do it, I tell myself. We can figure this out. But mostly I just breathe in and out, shallow, pregnant breaths.

Then the phone rings again startling me. I reach for it assuming it is HR, maybe they changed their mind about the severance? But it’s not HR, it’s the State of Wisconsin calling to let me know that they have found my birth mother and that she is interested in meeting me. I stop breathing and have to force myself to gasp for air when I realize it.

I had forgotten that I filled out that requisition form when I first learned I was pregnant. A form that asks the State of Wisconsin get in touch with my biological mother and requests permission to release her contact information to me. At the time I sent the form in it was a pressing curiosity, and now it was a reality I was unsure what to do with.

Her name was Kate and we exchanged emails for months before actually meeting. I learned that she grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, that she was a voracious reader, that she was second generation Dutch, that she never had any more children and that she was dying.

I first visited her at her apartment, and then later in hospice care. We sometimes talked about books and movies. But mostly I listened to the stories that she needed to tell, tales of a hard fought life. And she answered the inane questions I needed to ask, did she crave salt when she was pregnant with me?

So my click? It happened at Kate’s funeral. My relationship with her was something I was trying hard to make sense of. Though I treasured getting to know Kate, our time together was often incredibly hard. I sometimes wondered if I had made the right decision in contacting her. There were times when I felt like I was unable to give her as much as she wanted because my little family was struggling and needed so much of me. As someone that was dying and afraid there was often so much emotional connection she craved that it overwhelmed me and I pulled back.

But person after person came up to me the day of her funeral and told me how much my visits meant to Kate. That they seemed to light her up from the inside. And the memory of her beaming and introducing me to each and every person that entered her hospice room as “my daughter” came to me. And I realized that I was grateful to be able to have been there for Kate at the end of her days the way she was there for me at the start of mine. That I gave as much of me as I could, and that sometimes just showing up for someone is enough. And that it is always worthwhile to have had someone so special in your life, even if only for awhile.

OpinionatedGift’s Click

I met OpinionatedGift through this blog and Twitter.  He left a nice comment, I clicked on his blog, read and instantly knew he was good people.  I have so enjoyed reading his thoughts and opinions over the last year.  He is a really good friend and someone I have a lot of respect for.  He was among the first group of people I asked to write a click story for me.  I’ve tried not to pressure him too much, but remind him every now and then that I’m still waiting for his click.  He always tells me he’s still thinking about it.  Last week I read the following post on his personal blog and I thought…that’s it.  I emailed and asked if I could share it here.  He kindly agreed.  You can follow him on Twitter here and read his blog here.

Twelve years ago this week I was spending my days going through my father’s apartment with my brother. Dad had shot himself on the 9th and his body was found by his oldest friend in New York on the 12th. Twelve years ago Wednesday.

Twelve years ago I was sifting through grief, memory and questions questions questions. Not the ones you might think. The fact is, when I got the call from my brother that the police had called him from Dad’s apartment, I knew what had happened. I’d hoped I was wrong. But I knew.

Mom said it best that night when we called to let her know. “He was always so sad”. It was true. He was also scared. Whatever the combination, he had a dim world view.

I loved my dad. He was basically a good man who never really dealt with his anger issues, his alcoholism or his strengths. A talented actor, he’d packed us up from Tucson Arizona, sold the Ford Falcon and got us on a train to New York City and went straight into substitute teaching and social work. His career as an actor was essentially small productions in holes in the wall (before the moniker “Off Off Broadway” was coined.) and extra work in movies.

As a kid I would listen while he would lament the vagaries of the business and how hard it was…and it instilled in me the belief that the business was indeed brutal. It didn’t stop me from wanting to be an actor. It didn’t stop me from thinking I could do better. But these things are insidious and the sins of the father are often visited upon the son. His beliefs did become mine and even when I achieved some pretty good if minor successes, my joy would be tainted by fear of the success not lasting.

Now to be sure, being an actor isn’t easy. It can be brutal, but I can see very clearly as I look back how my own thoughts and feelings that were inherited affected the way I approached my career and subsequently the way my career developed…or didn’t as it turns out.

Twelve years ago fears and doubts overtook my father to the point that he no longer was able to reason. This man who raced down the street with me…encouraged me to take the training wheels off my back when he knew I could. The man who when he saw I was floundering in my efforts to audition for the High School of Performing Arts bought a gazillion plays for me to look through and helped me find the right pieces and even coached me. A man who as a social worker had saved or improved as best he could, so many lives, wasn’t even able to remember a simple meditation technique because anxiety had overcome him.

He’d been given Buspar and started to take it, then stopped. 12 years ago it got so bad that he sat at the edge of his bed and ate the barrel of a .357 magnum. He left a note that was really more of an excuse than anything else. Fears of a cancer that didn’t exist.

Two weeks later, the girl he wanted to marry, a dancer from Japan was finally allowed back into the country. He’d become convinced it wouldn’t happen after months of legal back and forth. Fear of being alone and abandoned convinced him that his life wouldn’t work out as he desired. So it seems he decided to just stop trying.

12 years later I still wrestle with loving him and hating him. Remembering his capacity for compassion for everyone while he seemed to only have pity for himself. I am sometimes on the edge of forgiving him. And then I remember having to tell my daughter what happened. I remember how as she is now almost 20 years old, she can’t play chess because that’s what she used to do with Grandpa. I can’t quite do it.

For the past 12 years, for about 3 weeks before and after the anniversaries, he shows up in my dreams. Sometimes as if he’s never been gone, sometimes as if he’s only been on some trip in South America or something and we all just THOUGHT he was dead.I forget about it…forget it’s that time of year…sometimes even the days of his actual death or the day he was found go by entirely unnoticed. Sometimes not.

Twelve years later I can watch Dirty Harry make one line comments about his Magnum and still get a kick out of it. But when Heroes first aired and there was an episode with half a skull being cut off and brains removed, I get completely worked up.

I wrestle with fear too. And it’s not hard to see how it keeps me from acting. Clouds my thinking. I’ve made a decades long struggle of shifting from “can’t” to “can”. It hasn’t been easy.

Twelve years ago I cremated my father. Twelve years later I’m still cremating parts of his legacy so I can rise from the ashes.

Ramblings

I have had no burst of inspiration today.  There’s no words of wisdom or deep questions I have for myself or you.  I’m writing this on Sunday, April 25.  The 25th of each month is no longer just another day.  The 25th will forever be the date that signifies one more month without Amy in my life.  Someone wrote the other day on Facebook that they think of her everyday.  I paused for a moment realizing that I don’t think of her as much anymore.  Everyday seems like a lot, but compared to every minute it is not.  For so many weeks, maybe even months, a minute could not pass without a memory or thought of Amy coming to mind.  But yes, like the friend on Facebook, I do still think of her everyday.  Yesterday I was on the couch reading and I stopped for a moment to think of her.  I looked up from my book and on PBS was a commercial for a documentary about frogs.  Today the girls brought me yet another mysterious toy frog that they found in their room.  She’s still sending me signs.  I hope she never stops.

I used a gift certificate and bought two books yesterday:  Love Without Conditions by Paul Ferrini and The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. I started reading them both yesterday.  Apparently The Master Key System is a 24 week program.  You are supposed to read each chapter over a week period and apply what you are learning.  I’m excited about it, but hope that I can stick with it.  I’ve bought and read several books like this one and never treated them like a class, but instead just devoured them and placed them back on the bookshelf.  Intellectually I understand a lot of what (I think) is going to be presented in this book, but it is really time to take it to the next level.  The best way to get to that next level is to use the book as suggested.

The other book, Love Without Conditions, is just wonderful.  Seeing as I had my belief in Jesus shaken a bit a week or so ago, this book is just what I needed.  It is not a channeled book specifically, but the text comes through the author from Jesus.  Ferrini says in the introduction that we all have access to Jesus and can commune with him and get the same information from within our consciousness directly from him.  I believe that because I have experienced it!  I have realized through some of the comments I received on that post, some answers I received within, and from what I read in this book that I really don’t need absolute proof of Jesus’ human existence on this earth for me to know that he is a spiritual teacher for me.  His words and lessons will not change.

Happy Monday everyone!  Have a great work/school week and for those of you who might be wondering…I did sign up to give a talk at church this summer.

Speaking Up

I learned from the 2008 presidential campaign that it is better for my health and well-being to keep my mind out of politics.  I tend to get bent out of shape and have learned that trying to argue politics with loved ones who disagree is akin to beating my head against a wall.  So these days, most of the time, I have my head in the sand.  When I do pull it out, I get some information via three blogs I love: The Rant by Tom Degan, Musings of a Madman, and Gifts of Thought.  These guys commentate on politics with a liberal leaning stance.  Through their blogs (and links they provide)  I’ve learned a bit about the Tea Party Movement.  I try not to worry about the effects of misinformation and hatred that is being propagated by so many of our citizens, but there are times when it is so in my face that I can’t help but worry.

Yesterday while visiting FB, I saw this on my homepage:

DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN

I visited the page and was shocked to see that it had over 500,000 “fans” and as of this writing it has over 900,000.  I also read through the comments and though there was the occasional “liberal troll” speaking out for how wrong it was, most people thought it was funny.  Joke or no joke, I view this as a public wish for the death of our president.  And the nearly one million people who have joined the page are in essence signing a petition.  And I know some of you might be reading thinking Geez, Leslee, get a life, lighten up, stop taking things so seriously.  And to that my response would be to share two very important lessons I learned as a kid.  First, hate is a strong word and you should think before you use it.  Second, it’s not OK to joke about death or wish harm on anyone else.  So if you realize those are two tenets I’ve tried to live my life by, it should be easy to see why I can’t lighten up on this one.

Somehow the current state of political affairs has brought out the worst in some.  I mean in looking at this group title I might start to stereotype who would join.  But when I look at the page it is filled with regular people.  Little silver-haired ladies, young soccer moms, cute Bieber looking teenage boys, and clean cut businessmen.   In my mind I think that hate has made it to the mainstream.  The powers behind this all have managed to feed on the weakest part of our essence, the fear that we are not safe and secure.  They’ve repeated the messages so often and so loudly that to many people it has become TRUTH.  And just to drive the message home they add God into the mix.  The next thing you know, good Christians are calling for the death of our president and all the liberals who love him.

So yes, I am worried about the future of my country.  I’m not worried because Barack Obama is president.  I’m worried because millions of children are being fed a steady diet of hate, intolerance and inflexibility.  In 2012 I will probably vote for Obama once again but I will not involve my daughters in the process.  In 08 I was proud to have my lil ones chanting O-BAM-A, but now, my protective instincts say otherwise.  What a sad state of affairs….

Here’s an interesting video, and for the record if my conservative father felt the same as this tea-partier he’d be calling for his own daughter’s head on a stick….or in boiling water.

I’ll end this with an interesting thought that popped into my head during meditation:  What if the Anti-Christ isn’t one person, but instead an entire angry mob of Christians forgetting to ask themselves the one question they so prevalently display on their t-shirts and bumper sticker: What would Jesus do?

Pauline’s Click

Pauline is another one of the awesome people I’ve met through Twitter.  She is also a stay-at-home-mom/writer.  You can read her blog here and follow her on Twitter here and here.

————————————-

I never referred to them as Grandma and Grandpa. I didn’t even remember them.

Using those words would have made me feel like I was faking affection for my mother’s parents when all I had was a few grainy photos and a gravesite for reference.

I knew the story. They had been on the way home from a trip to visit family in Mexico when a trucker fell asleep at the wheel and ran into their vehicle, head on. My mother, who had just turned 20, lost her parents that day. She was supposed to have been on that trip, she tells me, but she just couldn’t bear to leave her 10-month-old daughter for that amount of time.

I know it’s a sad story. But because I have no memory of them I also never allowed myself to feel anything on our yearly treks to the cemetery for birthdays and holidays so my mother could pay her respects.

“Time to go to the cemetery for your parents again?” I’d ask when I’d hear my mom on the phone making arrangements for floral blankets and gravesite tags and all that other business that fell into the category of Stuff I Couldn’t Relate To.

“Yep,” she’d reply. “Can you take me this weekend?”

So we’d get in the car and drive the 30-minutes to Detroit and I’d spend just the right amount of time standing beside my mother as she paid her respects before shuffling off to listen to the car radio or paint my nails and wait for them to dry while Mom lingered. She knew I wasn’t going to rush her. I may not have understood, but I wasn’t heartless, either.  So I’d add a second coat of polish if she was taking longer than usual.

I might have wished I was somewhere else. I may have sighed. A lot. But I never rushed her. And I’d talk myself out of feeling guilty for not giving a damn by reminding myself that I couldn’t really be upset about strangers being dead. Because really, that’s what they were, right? Right.

End of discussion.

But now, almost three years after the untimely death of my own father, I wonder if my toddler will be rolling her eyes at me every time I want to make a special trip to the cemetery to pay my respects. We won’t be able to go very often, mind you. He’s buried in Detroit, in the plot right next to my mother’s parents, and a far cry from our home in Arizona.

But there’ll be trips to see family. There’s a moment, each year on his birthday and on the day he passed that we all get melancholy because he’s not here to make us laugh. Or piss us off just so he can make us laugh again.

I wonder if she’ll think I’m crazy for not being able to throw away the last two cans of Miller Lite I found in our recycle bin because I knew they were his. Or if she’ll ever ask me about him and what he was like.

I wonder if she’ll even care.

She won’t remember him, after all. She was only six months old when he died. I was 29.

She won’t know his face. She won’t know his voice. She won’t know the devilish twinkle in his eye or how his ears would turn red when he was trying to pull one over on someone. She won’t know that he didn’t say he loved you. Or that you knew he did, anyway.

I can tell her all of these stories, of course. And she’ll be a good daughter and try to understand. Maybe even empathize. But she won’t really know.

I know this because it wasn’t until the moment my father was pronounced dead, just six months into his 50^th year and on my mother’s 49^th birthday that I finally understood what my mother had been dealing with all those years that I was pretending to care.

And it wasn’t until that first trip to the cemetery to visit my father’s grave, right next to that of my grandparents, that I knew what it was to stand on the very earth that had swallowed my heart.

But then I have moments where I think maybe Mom was on to something. Maybe I’ll follow her lead and just let my daughter be. There’s no need to force memories upon her that aren’t really hers, after all.

I can’t expect her to feel something for someone she never knew. Or understand the constant ache that’s always there, just under the surface. Or the guilt that comes with living when you know that you just left flowers for someone who’s supposed to still be alive, too.

And because I have my own driver’s license, there’s really no need to force her to tag along when I’m in town and can make a stop at the cemetery with my mother, who’s smarter and stronger than I ever gave her credit for. Because she knew that I didn’t understand and was glad for it. And she was so very devastated when I finally did.

I don’t want my daughter to know what that feels like. So I won’t say anything when she refers to her grandfather as “your dad.”