Change

Everything I Needed to Know for the Pandemic I Learned in Kindergarten: Creativity

by

Reading time: 2 minutes

In Kindergarten  we spent a lot of time with crayons, paint, paper,  paste, and scissors. This was the time when I felt most out of my depth. Every picture I drew, everything I made out of pipe cleaners or popsicle sticks looked like  . . . a mess. 

The picture above, for example, is not a keepsake from those days. I drew it this morning. I have improved a lot.

So, one of the things that I learned in Kindergarten is that “Art” is not for me. Later, the school choir director would tell me that singing is not for me. My failures at “Art” and singing persuaded me that the manual dexterity, self discipline, and ear required to play a musical instrument were not in my wheelhouse either.

My school days reinforced the lesson about “Art” that I learned in Kindergarten. “Art” is for other people who are more talented, disciplined, and creative than I am.

I bet that I am not only person who learned that lesson.

Our culture also gives us the message that “Art” is for the  professionals to make. The rest of us can pay for the concert tickets, recordings, museum memberships, and streaming services that support the professionals.

But, at its most basic level, art is what Mrs. Crawford tried to teach me with modeling clay or popsicle sticks that I could glue together. What I made did not resemble anything in nature, but I was putting things together, I was giving shape to the shapeless, and color to blank sheets of paper.

I was also learning that whatever I create will probably look like a mess at first. I eventually learned how to create with words. I made my living with words. Everything I write is a mess at first. It has taken me weeks to write these 500 words.

I see people around me putting things together, bringing a new order out of the chaos of COVID-19.  They may make messes, but they keep at it until something new emerges.  Some do it Mrs. Crawford’s way, with paints, and crayons, and colored paper. Some make mouth-watering dinners and desserts. Some are trying to work from home, keep their kids on track, and maintain their sanity. Some are literally trying to make something out of nothing.

My friend and former neighbor, Stephen Calhoun, who began playing around with his digital camera and an iPad and discovered  a whole new form of art, posted a quote on Facebook a couple of years ago that sums up what I want to say:

Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us.

To create means to relate.

The root meaning of the word “art” is “to fit together”

and we all do this every day.

Not all of us are painters

but we are all artists.

Each time we fit things together

we are creating –

whether it is to make

a loaf of bread,

a child,

a day.

—Corita Kent

Guest Blog: Everything I Needed to Know for the Pandemic I Learned in Kindergarten — Creativity

by

As I ask friends how they are getting through this strange time, a lot of them talk about going back to things we did in Kindergarten: drawing, painting, making things out of clay or wood — the stuff we often call “art.” (Soon, I’ll share something for those of you who, like me, don’t turn to these practices.)

Recently the Rev. Nancy Talbott wrote a letter to her congregation about how to take these practices deeper.

Nancy is pastor of The Congregational Church of North Barnstead in New Hampshire. She is also my sister. (Yes, it’s probably genetic.) Nancy not only writes, she makes music, draws, bakes, and builds congregations. She and her husband, Steve, have put two families together to create an amazing three-generational tribe. 

Nancy gave me permission to republish her letter here: 

Dear Friends,
The other day I was in a conversation with friends about how they are using their time during this Covid-19 summer.

One shared she was crafting and the other shared they have been doodling and coloring as a way to relieve stress and anxiety.

The coloring craze has been around for a number years now, and we can find adult coloring books everywhere, however, this conversation reminded me of a prayer practice I took on a number of years ago, after reading a book called, Praying in Color: Drawing a New Pathway to God, by Sybill Macbeth.


This practice is meditative, creative, and opens our communication with God. You can practice this anytime, however, it is an intentional practice, so turn off the 24-hour news cycle and find a comfortable, quiet place, a cup of tea or coffee, and begin!


All you need is a pencil or pen, and piece of paper. You can get fancy and pick up some colored pencils and a special pad of paper or a journal, however, the point is not to do too much planning…just begin.

Start with a name of someone you want to include in prayer, or maybe your own name. Draw a shape in the middle of the page, and write the name inside it, then draw another shape, and connect the two with a line. Or place God, Jesus, or Christ in the center and expand out with names or feelings, from there. There are no rules, the point is to relax with yourself and God for whatever time you want to spend.


You can also do this with a short piece of scripture as a Lectio Divina meditation. Here is a link for instructions on how to do this: Praying Scripture – click here


I have included some images at the end of this reflection for ideas. I have also included a link where you can find templates to print, however, I think the circles and curly-q’s you draw yourself will be better than any template.


This Covid-19 world is stressful and brings on so much fear and worry about things we cannot control. Praying in color, or just in black and white, can activate our right brains where compassion and creativity wait for us to participate, relax and grow.


When our hearts and minds are praying about ourselves and others, the perfect love of God enters our space and casts out our anxiety and our fear.
See you in worship!

Your pastor,
Rev. Nancy
Praying in color templates click here

I Shall Not Want

by

If you will listen, you will hear the great religious traditions of the world saying the same thing.

  • The Buddha says that the source of suffering is attachment.
  • Hinduism ditto.
  • The Judeo-Christian religion puts it even more succinctly:

“I shall not want.”

These words begin the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” 

Advertisers bombard us with messages all day long telling us what we want. Almost all of it is for stuff we don’t need. 

Open your email and you will see advertising messages on the side of your feed.

Same thing on social media.

Drive two miles in any urban area and count the signs telling you what you want.

Watch TV or go to the movies.  Watch the hero pick up a beer with the label carefully turned toward the camera.

You cannot unsee these messages, but you can immunize yourself with a counter-message.

Make, “I shall not want”, your affirmation.

Repeat it through the day.

   Your soul will be lighter.

      Your heart will be freer.

         Your decisions will be wiser.

            Your life will be simpler.

Stop wanting and you will see that you already have it all.

The Year of the Rat

by
Year of the Rat 2020

I like Chinese food. I hate the placemats in Chinese restaurants. No matter how many times I study them, they always tell me that I am a rat.

The placemats show the 12 years of the Chinese Zodiac.

I look at all the other years and wish I could be a Tiger or a Rabbit.

Dragon would be cool!

I’d settle for Pig.

Snake is a toss-up with Rat. Although I can think of more positive things about snakes.

No matter how many times I eat Chinese, the news is always the same. I am a Rat. To me the Rat represents all that is unlovely, unloving and unlovable in me.

Astrology may be bunk, but it points to the truth that life has certain “givens.” The Native American poet, Joy Harjo, now the U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote, “Remember the sky that you were born under.” People who live close to nature notice the way the stars shine the night a baby is born. Two billion Christians remember a star shining over Bethlehem one night long ago.

If I count the year I was born, the Year of the Rat has come around for the seventh time. If I look at myself at 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, and now, I see so many changes in those 12 year cycles, for example:

  • At 12, I was a farm boy.
  • At 24, I was young man with a wife, a baby, and a church.
  • In the past 12 years, both my parents died. For the first time, I left a church smaller than it was when I arrived. I retired. We moved to New York City.

I look in the mirror and compare what I see with snapshots taken from those other cycles of the Zodiac. Where did the hair go? How did what hair I have left turn so white when it started so black? Where did the wrinkles come from?

In some ways, what remains the same is more mysterious than what has changed.

How can I be the same person now that I was at 12? What is this mystery that I call my “self?”

I still read and then pontificate about what I’ve learned. I still laugh out loud at jokes other people don’t seem to get. But there are other things that also persist. All of them are part of the rat.

The Rat represents all those parts of me that I have tried to shut out, poison, or trap. I can’t kill it. Most of the time the Rat just hides in the shadows. But he is there. He is always there.

In this 7th Year of the Rat, I look back and see that there is not much I can do about my past failures and limitations. The rat-like genes that gnawed away the cilia inside my cochlea now may be gnawing at my bones and my lungs.

My life is my life. It is a combination of the choices I made and things that were built in to my life from conception. But oddly, that empowers me to make the best of what my life is, Rat and all.

Accepting the unlovely Rat in me also helps me see that the Rat can be “quick-witted, resourceful, and versatile” at times.

Maybe that’s why the Chinese astrologers also say that the Rat is kind. Once a Rat accepts and feels compassion for himself, he can care for other fallible human beings.

After all, if you can love a Rat, you can love anybody.

How To Time Travel Safely 2: Into the Future

by

When I was a pastor, I watched parishioners who, as they got older, seemed to be paralyzed.

  • They hung on to jobs that were too much for them.
  • They hung on to their big houses, when they couldn’t take care of them.
  • They hung on to their cars when driving was no longer safe for them — or anyone else.

These were often people who had made good decisions all their lives.

I used to think that they refused to look at the future.

Now, as I face aging myself, I see that the real problem is getting stuck in the future. They had looked ahead and saw nothing but decline and death. They believed that there was nothing they could do to make it better. So, they did not come back to the present to take action.

That is the problem with Mental Time Travel. We feel the impact of past or future events with the same intensity as if we were there.

James Baldwin wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”

We can’t change the fact that we will decline and die.

We do not have control over when we will die.

We do not control how we will die.

However, when we time travel to our last day, we can ask, “What can I change now that will make a difference on that day?”

I have seen people make significant changes in the last years, months, even days of their lives that made a difference in the end.

Here are some examples:

My mother loved her house, her garden, her community. On the night my father died, she said to me, “I’m going to move into a retirement community.” She faced the fact that she was declining. She would not be able to live alone much longer.

With the help of her children, she cleaned out her house and sold it. She, had never lived more than 15 miles from her birthplace. Even so, she moved across three states to a retirement community near one of my sisters.

There, she moved from independent living to assisted living to the memory unit. Each time she moved, she divested herself of what little she had left. When she died, she left behind a chair, a dresser, and two shelves of books.

I remember her as someone who calmly and courageously faced the fact of aging. She was a model for all of us.

I knew a man, who hid his vulnerabilities under bluster and bragging. Yet, as he was laid low with cancer, he opened up his heart to his wife, his children, and others. It softened their memories of him. For me, he is an example of how it is never too late to change.

There was a woman who spent much of her life in bitterness. She had no friends and she often alienated the relatives who tried to love her. Having to live in a nursing facility did not help.

One day, this woman changed. She was warm, grateful for a visit, interested in her visitors, and she had dropped her usual complaints about the world. She remained that way for the rest of her life. It changed the way everyone remembers her.

My mother’s Alzheimer’s disease used to make me despair about my future. Then, I started working with a doctor who recommended, The End of Alzheimer’s, by Dr. Dale Bredeson. That led to The Alzheimer’s Solution, by Drs. Dean and Ayesha Sherzai.

I am convinced that, even if I can’t completely prevent cognitive decline, I can make changes in my life that will slow it down. I’ve gone from despair to a feeling that I can do something. Plus, I feel better and sharper than I have felt in years.

If we don’t face the fact that we will decline and die straight on, we will be stuck there in despair.

If we do face the fact of decline and death, we can make changes now.

It is never too late to change things, even if it is just our attitude.

I’d like to hear from you.

Who are good examples for you?

What decisions have you made because you have faced your future?

After Christmas: What to Keep or Throw Away

by

What is your favorite Christmas memory?

One of mine is of my two grandfathers reminiscing about their boyhood Christmases. Each of them got an orange in his stocking, as I recall. They were in wonder about how times had changed.

My memory of their memories is how Christmas works. It is memory piled on memory leading back to a memory of a child’s birth in a stable a long time ago.

Christmas kicks up memories. You hang up the tree decorations that your kids made in third grade. You stumble onto your mother’s recipe for gingerbread. The tree in the corner of your living room reminds you of other trees in other rooms. Those memories will tell you important things about who you were and what Christmas used to be.

This Christmas, no doubt, created new memories. As you shove wrapping paper into recycling bags, you may decide to forget some of what happened this Christmas. As you put away the china, you may decide to keep other memories.

What do we save and what do we throw away?

I am now an expert on this question. Last summer we moved from a 5-bedroom house to a small apartment. The five-hundred-mile move meant that it would cost more to ship our stuff than we would pay to replace it. So we got rid of about 90 percent of what we owned. That included Christmas decorations.

I learned to distinguish between things that created nostalgia

and those that create hope.

A psychiatrist once wrote:

“Nostalgia is the enemy of hope

because it makes us believe

that our best days are behind us.”

In many ways the Bible is a book full of memories that were left when all the nostalgia was gone. The memories in the Bible are memories of what God did in the past that give us hope for the future.

The Christmas stuff was not easy to sort. But most of it  only reminded us of Christmases that won’t come again. We threw away a lot of stuff. One exception were some tree ornaments Jacquie made our first year in our first parsonage.  They were Christian symbols called “Chrismons.” We did not keep them to remember the giant tree we splurged on that year. It went in a bay window and it cut the windchill in the living room. We kept them because they give us hope that Christmas, and life, can be improvised in new times and places. They remind us that the best parts of Christmas and of life will not come from a store.

The other thing we kept was a manger scene my Aunt Joyce gave us. Joyce spent forty years as a missionary in Nigeria. A Nigerian artist had carved the figures from large thorns that grow on a tree there. The manger scene takes us back to that earliest of all Christmas memories. That memory gives us hope that, even when the world is ruled by cruelty and mean-spiritedness, even when there is no room for the poor, God will come and be with us in the darkest times — in the midnight hour.

The way Christmas comes each year, and the way it goes, reminds us that nothing will ever be the same again. But, the love that put oranges in my grandfathers’ stockings, the love that sewed homemade decorations for our tree, will come again in new ways and even to new people.

I keep my memory of my long-dead grandfathers sharing their memories. I do not do so because I long for a simpler time. But because that memory gives me hope that sharing my memories  with my grandchildren will give them hope for days long after I am gone. I hope that they will be able to share memories with their grandchildren that will give them hope, as well.

So, think about what you throw away this year and what you keep.

The Past is Ever Before Us

by

Recently, I learned that people in some cultures gesture before them when they speak of the past. When they talk about the future, they gesture behind them.

It makes sense. We can see the past as clearly as we see what is in front of us. We cannot see the future, just as we cannot see what is behind our backs. (Elementary schoolteachers are an exception, of course.)

It comforts me, as we leave a place and people we love, to think of the past as ever before me. I will always be able to see those people and places in a way I am not able to see my future. But how does one do that without living in the past? How does the past become a place of reference, not residence?

Our 49th anniversary was our next-to-last day in Cleveland. We spent part of it at one of our favorite places, the Cleveland Museum of Art. CMA contains one of the best and most balanced collections of art in America.

You can see many world-famous pieces of art for free. It does not have gates inside the door, with employees “suggesting” a $20 “donation.” CMA’s trustees follow the museum’s founders’ desire that it be free “for all the people forever.”

When our sons and then our grandchildren were small, they loved the armor court. There, knights wear truly shining armor. We also loved watching our grandchildren create art on giant, super-duper iPads in the Artlens Gallery. Those are some of our favorite memories.

At the museum, Jacquie and I, farm kids who grew up knowing nothing about art, learned how to “see” art. By looking at good art, we learned the simple method of distinguishing it from bad art. As one art critic says, “When you see bad art, you first go “Wow!” Then, after looking longer, you say, “huh?”, because there isn’t much there. When you see good art, you may say, “huh?” first. But then, if you look longer, you begin to say, “Wow!”

We sat for several minutes in front of “Lot’s Wife.”This monumental painting shows the bleakest landscape you can imagine. In the foreground, are railroad tracks like the ones that carried doomed passengers to the death camps. In the background, are the shadows of what appear to be ruined buildings obscured by smoke.

Yes, when I first saw it years ago, I said, “huh”. The longer I look at it, the more I say, “Wow!”

Going to the museum symbolizes what I mean about the past being ever before us. Our memory mounts moments on the walls of our hearts like paintings in a museum. We can see faces before us the way Rembrandt saw a kitchen maid.

We can see camping trips before us the way the Hudson River School artists painted the wilderness.

We can take our time as we look at those moments. We can step back and get perspective, or move in close to see the tiny details.

Chances are, the moments that made us say, “Wow!” at first, will remain in the warehouse. The ones that we hang in the galleries of the heart will be the moments that puzzled us, maybe even pained us, or have escaped our notice until now. What was that fight about? What about those meals we shared with others?

Stepping back, we can see deeper meaning in them. We may see grace strokes that we missed at first. We may see how those moments influence our choices now, the way artists today learn to draw from Michelangelo or learn to break the rules of drawing from Picasso.

We do not put the past and all the people we have loved and all the places we have been behind us. The past is ever before us. All we have to do is look.

Burden or Anchor?

by

When we were first married, we had nothing. One day, my Mom took Jacquie and me to yard sale. Mom spied an end table blackened with old varnish and asked how much it was. The person said, “five dollars.”

Mom said, “he’ll take it.”

I was a little taken aback by the way Mom was spending my money and started to object as the owner went to get her money box to receive my five dollars.

Mom said in a whisper, “It’s solid cherry.”

It was. She refinished it. It was beautiful. It became an anchor for us. It was one of the first things that Jacquie and I owned together. It was ours, instead of mine or hers. When we bought other furniture, it dictated our taste. Our first really big purchase was a cherry bedroom suite. Not many years ago, we bought a new dining room table and chairs, also cherry.

Mom refinished that end table half a century ago. It probably needs refinishing again.

Someone else can do that. It is not going with us. We are deeply grateful for my mother’s discerning eye and her hard work. We are also ready, as we approach our 50th anniversary next year, to ask ourselves what we like.

Things change in the second half of life.

What used to be an anchor can become a burden. As we let go of our old anchors, we gain the freedom to sail into whatever is next on life’s journey.

That’s the way Jacquie and I feel as we let go of so many things in order to move from our four-bedroom house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio to a small apartment in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City. We would not be going on to this next chapter if we hung on to things that cost us a lot of money. or that have deep sentimental value, or just seem like the things that two people our age ought to have.

In some ways, my mother is my model for this. When my Dad died, she had a house jam-packed with so many things she had refinished. She had a barn full of things (especially chairs, for some reason) that she was going to refinish. She had never lived more than 15 miles from where she was born in Western New York. But she left almost all of it behind to move to a retirement community in New Hampshire, near my youngest sister. As the Alzheimer’s progressed, she moved from her large independent living apartment to a smaller assisted living apartment. She eventually shared a room with another patient in the memory unit and died owning a bed, a chair, a dresser, and a small bookshelf. One shelf was full of Agatha Christie mysteries. She said the great thing about Alzheimer’s was that she could read them again since she couldn’t remember how they came out.

Someday, even our old bodies that have anchored us to this earth for so many good years will become burdens that we will need to lay down, too.

I hope that when we do, we will be able to sail away to whatever is next.

The Friends Who Helped Me Become More Human

by

By Roger Talbott

Two of my teachers died this past month. Orlando was a cat with less than half a tail. Henry was a delightful dog. *
 
Orlando, a yellow cat, belonged to Doug and MaryAnn Kerr, who live across the street from us. “Belonged” means Orlando granted them the privilege of feeding and housing him. He let them pay his veterinary bills when he got into fights.  But he roamed the neighborhood like he owned all our yards. Age finally caught up with him a few weeks ago. We are already seeing an uptick in the number of squirrels and chipmunks since he died.
 
Henry was a golden retriever. Henry lived up to that breed’s reputation for being friendly and playful . There was no question that Henry loved Jim and Cathy Stentzel more than anything in the world. We met Henry about a year after Cathy and Jim brought him home  as a very young dog.
 
Orlando seemed much the same right up until the end. We did not see much change in the 15 years we lived across the street.
 
We saw Henry only once or twice each year, so we noticed how he grew and changed and, eventually, aged. As a young dog, he ran circles around the slower humans who took him for walks. His size and stubbornness made him hard to resist when he wanted to go one way and you wanted to go another. His good-natured enthusiasm for his quest was even harder to resist. Over the past couple of years, we saw Henry slow down, take shorter walks and longer naps. But he never stopped beating his tail on the floor with joy when Jim and Cathy would arrive home.
 
It is only when Henry and Orlando died that I realized what they had taught me. When I learned of their deaths, I felt sad. That feeling of sadness amazed me. It told me something deep inside of me had changed. 
 

Learning to Be Tough

I grew up on a dairy farm surrounded by animals. We had a dairy barn full of Holsteins. We also raised chickens and hogs. We always had a cow dog that helped us move the cows from the pasture to the barn. We had cats running around the barn to keep the mouse population under control. The dog had a name, Queenie. My sisters gave some of the cats names. I did not learn to love animals on that farm.
 
I learned to take care of the animals because our living depended on them. I tossed bales of hay down a chute from the mow to the barn below. I climbed a silo in the dead of winter and forked chopped corn into a feed cart three stories below. I shoveled manure into a manure spreader. So, I cared for their needs. I also learned how to milk the cows, gather the hen’s eggs, feed the hogs, and how to help butcher cows and hogs and chickens so we could eat them.
 
I know people who grew up on farms and people who live on farms who love animals. I do not think farming is completely incompatible with compassion. But, I never learned how to love animals and kill them.   I chose to think of animals as commodities. I measured their value in dollars and cents per pound, like milk and eggs and oats and hay. I was like the kids who have spent two years raising a steer that wins the Grand Champion ribbon at the fair. As a reward, they get a big check from the owner of a local restaurant. Some city-bred reporter will ask them if they are sad that their steer will be turned into steaks. The kids usually say, “Are you kidding? Why do you think I went to all that trouble in the first place?” I was tough and realistic.
 

How What We Believe Hardens Our Hearts

My mother’s theology further justified my attitude toward animals. When, as a little boy, I asked her if animals went to heaven, she explained that they do not because they do not have souls. She taught me to read the Creation story as a story about how human beings are special and different. We have souls. Animals do not. We commune with the Lord. Animals do not. We go to church and to heaven. Animals do not. She was in line with traditional Christian theology. I did not know it then, but those teachings hardened my heart.
 
When I was a pastor, parishioners would tell me about losing their beloved pets. I sensed that they were grieving, and I hope that I said appropriate things, but I admit that, inside, I did not get it. I empathized when they grieved for a relative or a friend. I did not understand the grief they felt for a pet they had recently put down.
 

Finding the Center

In my two years of retirement I have been practicing meditation. I supplement my life-long practice of prayer centered on Jesus with Yoga classes. I read books on Jewish spirituality recommended by my daughter-in-law, a Rabbi. I read books on Buddhist meditation recommended by Henry’s owner, Cathy.
 
I see a common thread running through these writings. I have learned what several wise observers mean when they say, “The theologians all argue. The mystics all agree.”
 
These books and practices lead me to a warm place in my heart. I believe that place is in every heart and at the heart of the universe. In that place is profound stillness and immense power. It is the Truth. It is Love. The New Testament calls it “God.”   
 
People of all faiths and no faith encounter this Truth and Love.  They may meet Love in deep meditation. They may meet Love when they hold a newborn baby. They may meet Love when they connect with a friend. They may meet Love when a slender ray of hope penetrates despair. When they speak of it, I recognize the same Love Christians meet in Jesus. 
 
We also call this Love, “Truth,” because Love shows us that all our reasons for not loving are based on lies. I can see how the “terrorists” and “bigots” twist their religious beliefs to justify not loving. A hard heart can turn any scripture into a lie that explains why it is OK to kill some people, or animals, and not others. It is harder for me to see how I do the same thing with my hard heart. 

Getting Past the Hard Heart 

Hard hearts even argue with the Bible. Yes, the Creation Story says humans and animals are all made from the same dust on the same day. But, said my hard heart, look at how much longer the author lingers over the creation of people.
 
I know the breath that God breathes into humans making them “souls” is callednephesh in Hebrew. I know that the same nephesh gives all beings life. But, said my hard heart, “nephesh” means “soul” in some places and “breath” in others.
 
Arguments did not work. It was Orlando and Henry who wore me down. Henry did it as he danced around Jim’s legs.  Orlando did it when I caught sight of him silently hunting in our hostas. I did not know that I learned to love them until after they died. Orlando and Henry changed me in the way Carl Jung said happens to us in the second half of life.
Before I retired, I did a series of sermons on the Beatitudes.  “Beatitude” means “happiness”. So, the second Beatitude always stumped me, “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”  How can grief be happiness? We only grieve those we love. Now I understand. I mourn Orlando’s and Henry’s deaths. I am comforted by feeling that sadness, because it means that I am in touch with Truth and Love.

And, in the Real World

Yesterday, my sister told me that her son and his wife had their first baby, a little boy. Mom is the daughter of Filipino immigrants.
As I got this news, news about how our country is separating the children of illegal immigrant children from their parents at our borders was playing in the background.
I was reminded of a story Christians tell each other every December. You may have heard it. It is about a baby born into a world in which there was no room for him. The story tells how his parents, like so many people in Central America today, feared for their child’s life. They, too, headed for the border and they somehow got across without losing their baby.
Jeff Sessions is a devout and faithful member of same denomination that I served as pastor. He hears the Christmas story every year. That story is in the same Bible that he quotes to justify his draconian policy of tearing children from their parents. After all, he and millions of Americans agree that we have no more room for such people. I drove across Wyoming, Idaho, and Eastern Oregon two weeks ago, and I think we could squeeze in a few more people. But if you agree with Jeff Sessions, you have already come up with good reasons why I am full of B.S.
The Christmas story does not argue with you or Jeff Sessions. The babies that God keeps sending us do not argue either. The merciful God will not beat you or me into becoming the full image of Love and Truth. But sooner or later, I pray that Love will appear to you and me and Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump. I pray that we may be worn down by Love when it appears in a new baby, a golden retriever, or a cat with less than half a tail. Then we will stop being “tough” and start being as human as Jesus.
*This is an update of an earlier version published on June 12.