Sounds of Hope

I was asked interesting questions today. Actually it was more of a comment than a question. It was the question that rose up in me that was more where the question part from. I have a friend. She is not religious. She is a good person. That is not to be read “she is not religious but a good person.” It is just what it says. She is a good person. She is not religious. Being a good person and being religious are no synonymous with each other. I know a lot of religious people that I don’t care to be around. My friend was telling me about her friend; a friend who lost nearly everything in the Nashville flood of May 2010. Since then the friend’s disabled spouse has had a heart attack, had adult child with spouse and four small children move in with her and yesterday, the father of those small children was killed because he tried to check a tire on her car. The jack didn’t hold and the car crushed him. She blames herself. Four children are orphaned. How much more can this woman bear? The s...

I am fired up. I haven’t been this fired up about anything really important in a long time. While in some ways to have my passions stirred is a good time. I haven’t hidden the fact that I’ve been terribly depressed for a long time. But on several levels I am not sure I like being stirred up.  First I wish this issue would go away. I wish Dr. Jones and now this Pastor in Springfield TN would just come to their senses, repent and not burn anything this weekend. Second, I fear that I will be misunderstood, lose friends which are valuable to me and maybe even vilified.   As I said yesterday, I am much more the Kumbaya, get along type person. I feel a real sense of grief in my spirit. After I wrote my blog yesterday, I saw the post from a Pastor in Pakistan. I could feel the pain in his words. He was begging for us, his brothers and sisters in the west to do what we could to stop the burning of Qur’ans. He posted a picture of a burned house in Pakistan. I know religious militant...

I am not sure I want to write this blog. I might lose some friends. I might be misunderstood. I like to get along with people. I really do. It isn't that I don't have a backbone, I just would rather sing Kumbaya and hold hands. Or maybe go back to the 70's and sing And They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love. Those were the days. Flower children and Jesus Freaks, holding hands and giving out flowers. Now we want to burn things. What's happened to us? I have a young friend that I met by chance (as if that's possible with me). I like her. I've already learned from her. She is an iconoclastic feminist Native Woman who loves Jesus. Yeah, that is possible. What I've learned from her in the short time I've known her, is sometimes you just have to say what needs to be said. I learned something from an atheist friend yesterday too. Yes, I am friends with several atheists. I like them as people. The one I met before he was an atheist. I remember him a...

With all this talk about mosques and terror, as if the two are always synonymous, I want to tell you about my visit to a mosque. I am just going to tell you the story and you can draw your own conclusions. I also am not going to try to second guess any and every argument you might want to offer for what you see is “your” side of the issue. I’m just going to tell you a story. It’s my story. Actually it is just one story; I have a lot of them. I have been to a mosque quite a few times and only one time, was a visit to a mosque a bad experience. We were living in Connecticut. There were several mosques within a half hour drive from us. My husband began to attend one in the largely Hispanic neighborhood near Park Street. The worshippers were a variety of people with a heavy emphasis on African Americans. But there were a little bit of everything, Hispanics, whites, Middle Easterners and South Central Asians. They were cramped. They had little space as they assembled on Friday for their we...