Quick Hits: Put down the stones. Pick up the wounded.
From D.W.: A couple of quick ones mid-week just because I was thinking about it... A couple of weeks ago our President said, to a female reporter asking a legitimate question, "quiet, Piggy." Last week the same President vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries." These things made me think of a couple of all-too-relevant Rachel posts:
Facebook. June 1st. 2020
I’m officially the most angry and upset and furious and full of wrathful and righteous indignation as I have ever been in my entire life.
What I have just witnessed from the current Chief Executive makes me sick to my soul. This man is a liar and a thief and a sexual predator and a documented racist. This man has no respect for law and order. This man does not hold life, or kindness, or love in any kind of esteem. He is profoundly ill and (from the very start) absolutely unfit for office. His entire administration has been a mockery of the entire American experience and a barely contained and morally vacuous emotional and spiritual and political nuclear toxic waste fire.
I hope we’re all still alive by Election Day. I hope there’s something worth a damn left voting for. Every day this man is allowed to continue his relentless, rootless, unhinged, unformed, and hateful garbage, there’s less and less of both. And there are far too many people who are still swilling the garbage juice with delight. Let me say, with all due respect: stop it. That way lies madness and more jagged and rusted sharp cutting edges of destruction and division than we can imagine. And we’ve already cut each other up so so badly.
The current chief executive isn’t the kind of person who should lead other people, much less 350 million of them. He is ill and unkind and seems to have very little love or joy in his life. Pray for him every time you can. And pray that God moves in all our hearts, especially his, for the peace and healing of our nation.
Lord Jesus, hear our prayers for mercy. Hear the cries of your children in the streets tonight. Soften the hearts of those who stand against them. Send your angels to tend them, send us to sit with them. Sit with us as we light candles and pray if we cannot be in the streets with them. Lift up the lowly, cast down the powers, break the chains of mistrust and denial.
Be peace to us. Be peace for us. Be peace in us. Come quickly. Amen.
Facebook. November 16th. 2015 .
Peace, peace, peace. The way forward is kindness, even to those who are unbearably, unimaginably unkind. When I think of how we should respond to hate, I think about Jesus, looking at the criminals on his right and left, at both the collaborators and his comforters gathered at the foot of the cross, and I remember that the way forward, the only way there has ever been forward, in the face of death, hate, and aggression is forgiveness and love. We do not deserve forgiveness. We do not deserve love. But we are given these by a God who does deeply and radically love us, and who asks us to love each other, especially when we are at our most unlovable.
I don't want to see one more post about how right or righteous it is to leave refugees--many of them children--out in the cold out of fear or conviction that another refugee is responsible for terror or acts of violence and war. I don't want to see one more post about righteous might and warplanes and bombs. I don't want to see one more person defile the God they claim to love with words of hate or disrespect toward people they should simply be praying for and seeking to have compassion toward. If you really love Jesus, if you really give a damn about the least of these, about the life-changing love of the gospel, act like it. Put down the stones. Pick up the wounded. Bring the kingdom.
