Reminiscent

Ok everyone, I am sure people thought I would not say something like this, but I am at least going to mention the spiritual topic of plagues as cures. It doesn’t have to be about coronavirus and of course I am sad about people dying. 50 MTA subway workers have died so far, and cops, health workers, and all kinds of people who I of course would not want to ever have died.  But our world has a lot of problems right now worse than death, even if people refuse to ever acknowledge that fact while abusers get away with more and more child abuse, torture, and exploitation of workers essentially on the level of lifelong slavery. As good things come from people abruptly facing mortality and having to adapt to sudden lifestyle changes, some of the bad business people are more obvious, the government problems can’t be denied, and a calling to young people to act on what they have learned is on the table.  And I will not pretend that I don’t hope that God is intervening with some of our society’s ills while we genuinely fight this terrible pandemic that retains its tragic nature even while catalyzing some needed recognition of what is right and wrong. It does not need to be erroneously seen as a blessing of any sort, but God’s wielding of all the bad things in life to get rid of the worse things that people did not fight as well is something I will not ignore and will not keep to myself in case other people can look back in history and see that God has cared all along and always intervened faithfully in ways that outsmarted all of our worst foes and villains.

The Whole World Times

Well hi everyone. I think what I am about to say in this blog post is really good sermon material and probably one of my best ideas to share.  It has to do with Presbyterian theology and a verse in the bible that says “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Well I will say that the both the verse itself and Presbyterian theology have both been a source of stress for me at various times because of my mental illness.  The Presybterian ideas have to do with everything already being in God’s control or already decided, which is some of the best news but can be distorted in your mind to make you think there is no hope for some people’s salvation.  And the verse about not being ashamed of the gospel has driven me crazy personally because I have continual awkward scrupulosity about sharing my faith. People like me imagine that verse sometimes and feel pressure to share things at the wrong times to some people who have often made things more awkward on purpose.  But if you combine those two ideas, the theology of God being in charge of all reality, and the idea of not being ashamed of the gospel, you can realize a tool that can provide some relief to some of our worst angst.  And the idea is simply that because God is good and all loving and in control, then all of reality is the gospel.  It is good news, and an antidote to shame.  You can’t zoom in and get illogical about it and say that tragedies are good, and that is not what I am saying at all.  But I am saying that because all things work out for our benefit, then for some of the problems that we feel really bad about, and truly ashamed even, then we can say instead, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” I am talking about not being ashamed of having said the wrong thing, done the wrong thing, being video-taped making rude gestures or being mad at people, failing at a job, embarrassing health problems, a messy apartment, and even our worst sins that maybe we kind of should feel bad about sometimes.  But instead we have full permission to view it all as part of God’s plan and we can tell ourselves, “I am not ashamed of having all the belongings in my apartment ruined by mice and bugs, because it has the power to save.  I am not ashamed of accidentally hitting myself in a zoom meeting, because it is part of the whole gospel of Jesus Christ. Do you guys see this trick I am saying? I really think it could work for some of us who are so tormented by our problems that seem to not have a purpose but actually do.

One of my friends rose from the dead.

    Today is Easter. Jesus died and some of his friends went to check on the grave and someone said “He is not here, he is risen.”  Well that is great news because he had said that he would rise again in three days if people destroyed him. I do not know if some people still had hope about that or not after the bad cross incident but I am sure they were very excited when his prediction or promise turned out to be true. I am going to be excited when I get to heaven and have a stone cottage with a bookstore basement that attaches to the underground lazy river network. 

     I don’t think it will be awkward when people meet Jesus in heaven. I pray in ways that I would never talk to someone face to face, like just a steady stream of requests, but I think that is how it was meant to be and that is the way that I get to experience having God as a boss for some of my most real professions in life, which have to do with prayer and life that can’t be taken away by other jobs and responsibilities. I think that in that way, God is an artist using psychological distance to create the relational effects he wants, and I should be happy for my amount of psychiatric problems that do impact my ability to feel love and happiness from God or anyone else. And what have I learned from it all? Well it is what I would tell people who just arrived at the scene. I would just tell anyone to ask God for 45 million dollars, blessings, or jackpots every day, either as a one-time request for the future or to ask him for it each day. And if there is something that seems better, then ask for that instead. And you will find out that the greatest thing was being able to ask at all.

Different Kinds of Trusts

All my life I have heard people talk about trusting God, and how it is his main wish and expectation for us. It is most often the advice offered to help with anxiety, and I am currently learning to have more faith and less fear.  However, as someone who has had a lot of chronic burdens and ongoing threats of ruin, and as a person who has also had to manage my own bad tendencies with an exhausting vigilance, I just want to stick up for all the people who suffer with stress and say that doing what you know you are supposed to while feeling extreme stress and danger is also a way of trusting God.  Obedience anyway and doing what God wants while feeling scared to death is not only a form of trust but possibly the most important kind that yields the most long term peace.  Social work mindfulness practices often affect me in the same way as a lot of psychological encouragement to trust God, and those perspectives do sometimes provide temporary relief that can increase endurance for long-term challenges. But those difficulties that are in fact inherently stressful can also be where the real trust is. When there are things like keeping medical insurance, or for some people, working at their callings without medical insurance, or people taking care of kids who need a lot of supervision and monitoring, or life with tough budget requirements, or managing health conditions, or whatever else those anxiety provoking things are, the courage to go ahead and face it with literal responsibility is also a form of dependence on God. Anxiety is a difficult challenge of recent times, and people we will meet in heaven may not have had even a taste of that kind of stress in their lives. They had their own struggles, and I can really see a different world as I schedule out my groceries for the coronoravirus quarantine and think about old times. But I just want to say for anyone else who has sometimes felt pressure to just let it all go and leave all the responsibilities behind in the name of letting God handle everything, that going ahead and carrying a heavy cross, or really any cross or burden, can be the extreme trust that goes unrecognized as simple faith.

Limiting the News

Well everyone, I have been thinking a lot about religion as it relates to the virus outbreak, and the risk of it all has made me think about what counts as the gospel of Jesus Christ and what exactly is promised to who.  It is one of the main things that has gotten confused and confusing in our times, and many people are very mad at any religious person at all because of the way a lot of us tried to convert people for credit, or turned what could have really been good news into a weird warning, like, “you’re going to hell if you don’t believe the same thing I learned at a church camp in middle school.” But in these scary times,  I must say that I think that it is nice that God’s love can be expressed as either something you don’t have to do anything at all to earn, or actually the opposite, which is that there is something you can do, and it is a simple prayer. It is nice in a crisis to have practical steps to take for safety and a sense of agency, and for the matter of eternal destination to be securable with a simple request to God for mercy and salvation is really a great provision that to me surpasses even the bomb shelters fully stocked with groceries and hoarded supplies being sold for five thousand dollars in a culture that cracks down on gouging for cleaning supplies but doesn’t care that almost all the real estate people gouge everyone for rent all year round. Anyway. I don’t need to go on a tangent but some people are going to go on quite a tangent all the way to hell if they think they are going to get away with what has happened in our country for the past 30 years of discrimination, abuse, and healthcare scams against sick people who chose the wrong epidemics to qualify for medical care and government aid. But anyway what was I saying. Ok I was saying there is a prayer that people can pray and a fountain of blood that has the antibodies needed for the worst problems in the world, which is the greed and evil behind all the bad behavior that has come to light in recent days, or unfortunately continues in ways unknown to many but always apparent to an all-knowing God. I meant for this post to be comforting but some people might be comforted by people not knowing what prayer to pray.