Hateland, Social Media and Kim Kardashian

Hateland is occupying us I fear.

It is the place in our hearts that reserves the right to hate others that have an opinion different from ours.

I guess everyone's heart has in it the seeds of hate, but the permission to sprout is ours to grant.

Once sprouted, the root system from person to person is watered by social media.

I love social media, because it is passion-neutral. It can be used to spread impassioned hate or healing love.

Yesterday morning, Kim Kardashian tweeted to her 17 million followers that she was "praying for everyone in Israel."

Hateland took center stage, directing her to "die in hell" and described her as a "disgrace to her people."

Who, exactly, are her people?

Was the prayer the offense--or was it Israel?

Do we gently but firmly stand our ground in Hateland or do we back down?

Kardashian deleted the Israel tweet, posted that she was praying for those in Palestine and across the world, then deleted that tweet, and ended the day with a message on her blog; she apologized for offending some but added that her intentions were to pray for those innocent people caught in the crossfire.

Jesus entered Hateland 2,000 years ago so we are not inventing anything new. He offended and offended big. He stuck to his story--called a spade a spade--and offered love to grow in the place of hate.

We didn't listen then; in fact, we tried to kill off Love.

At the end of the day, I guess we can only help the love seeds in our heart sprout, while keeping check on the seeds of hate that lie dormant, ready to germinate at a social media moment's notice.

I think Kardashian stood her ground, even while apologizing. I hope 17 million people took a breath and considered that praying for innocent people caught in the crossfire of hate is a powerful social media risk worth taking.

Hateland doesn't have to take us down.

God's Teaspoons of Hope

God's hope is as big as the universe, but He seems to dole it out in teaspoons.

Why teaspoons when we often feel like we need so much more just to get through the hardships of the day?

Every recipe has an ingredient that makes it come together, to work properly, to make single items combine into a greater whole.

Maybe it is a teaspoon of salt or baking powder or sugar.

Would more of the power ingredient make it better?

Do our muffins need a 1/2 cup of baking powder? Does our soup need a 1/3 cup of salt?

Conversely, to leave out the power ingredient would be to have a recipe disaster and a useless dish on our hands.

Every new day is a recipe, and when we let God help us prepare, He hides that power ingredient--hope--in some unexpected place and, a teaspoon at a time, turns our day into a thing of beauty in His eyes.

Hope is on His timeline, fashioned by Him and doled out by Him.

Don't buy false hope...it's not worth the money you fork out.

True hope is free...it is the secret ingredient of life.

How Much Does Unforgiveness Weigh?

Let's just say you are carrying around the weight of unforgiveness. Someone has harmed your body, your heart, your childhood, your spirit.

Inside the bag you are now shouldering are three distinct weights:

1. God's matching unforgiveness toward you.

2. The potential disease(s) to which your body is now prone.

3. The larger target that makes you easy aim for the enemy.

Matthew 6:15 says:

In prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can't get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God's part.

Multiple studies corroborate that nursing a grudge means holding onto anger, and prolonged anger spikes our heart rate, lowers our immune response, and floods the brain with neurotransmitters that slow down problem-solving, even while stirring up depression. Over and over, research shows that forgiveness lowers blood pressure and increases optimism. Dr. Frederic Luskin, Director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, says:

When you don't forgive, you release all the chemicals of the stress response. Each time you react, adrenaline, cortisol and norepinephrine enter the body. When it's a chronic grudge, you could think about it 20 times a day, and those chemicals limit creativity; they limit problem-solving. Cortisol and norepinephrine cause your brain to enter what we call 'the no-thinking zone,' and over time, they lead you to feel helpless and like a victim. When you forgive, you wipe all that clean.

Nelson Mandela made famous this idea:

Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.

Since God doesn't feed us poison, that drink can only be what the enemy aims at you when you are holding the larger target of unforgiveness. Being a good investment of the enemy's time is always a losing proposition.

All of this is the weight of the bag you are choosing to carry.

Hope it's a pretty bag because it sure is killing you.

Walk It Back

It is the bad mood of the day.

Perhaps you awakened in a better mood, but early on someone, or something, tore a hole in better and suddenly you could bite that proverbial nail in two.

Yesterday morning something tore a hole in my better mood. It appeared to revolve around my husband, whose greatest offense was that it was his birthday. Probably not his fault, and since it was his birthday, one of those with an "0" at the end and you feel it is a bit more special, I thought I owed it to him to keep looking for the culprit.

By the time I got to the track to walk, I understood where I let myself get punctured. I had put off a task the night before--washing my husband's new jeans so he had them to wear on his day--and then became exasperated that the washer didn't go into sonic speed to make up for my bad. I actually became annoyed that the washer...um, did its job--the way it always does.

A few rounds of the track left me with this truth: I could feel angry all day because my expectations were ridiculous, or I could ask God to forgive my procrastination (easily accomplished) and forgive myself (much harder to do).

As I walked forward, I knew I had to walk it back.

I made peace with the washer, but more importantly, with myself. The hole in my better mood was repaired, and the day could be what God offered from the beginning:

A celebration of life, truly the chart of every day.

Find the courage and grace to walk it back.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 10

It is downright scary to let God be God. He might take our thinking into cultures, worldviews and isms that we were kept safe from when the God of our first half-of-life appeared to play by our rules.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, that God plays by anyone's rules but His own, but that was all we could see and it helped us build our container. It helped to secure the foundation of our belief that there is, indeed, God and an eternity to which we are headed.

Now that nothing can rip us from that belief, can we trust that same God to carry us into a bigger slice of His infinite view? Can we hold His hand and allow Him to carry us into the scary and uncharted waters of other ways people call on Him, believing that He wants them to arrive at His destination as much as He desires our arrival?

Such a notion requires an expanded trust in God.

Rohr says:

We are often so attached to our frame, game, and raft that it becomes a substitute for objective truth, because it is all we have! Inside such entrapment, most people do not see things as they are; rather, they see things as they are (p.148).

In that sentence, the emphasis is moved--the words remain unchanged. But there is a world of difference.

If we let God change our emphasis from our small world to His large world, Truth remains unchanged. But there is a difference in the world.

That difference is an embrace, and a movement, and a desire to grow together, leading each other to the Truth of Forgiveness that is Jesus, God's destination for all of us.

May your thinking move into the second half of life, for in the beauty of that place, you can now let everyone get there.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 9

Breathe.

There is new air in the second half of our spiritual journey, or perhaps better stated, we have access to this air we didn't even know existed before.

To me, this air is an embrace and acceptance in two major areas: God and self.

God is ever larger, ever more mysterious, and I have less need to understand. I don't try to shut Him down when He appears in other cultures in a God-pursuit I do not recognize. He knows if His heart is pleased with their journey; it is not mine to judge.

Only God has it right. My rightness is an illusion that propped me up through my first half of life journey--useful then, unnecessary now--and becomes in my second half a shadow that must be relinquished.

Rohr states in Chapter 11:

Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see.

The peculiar strand of my study in spiritual endeavors has been to try and decipher evil and the way it plagues our everyday life--how we can recognize it and join forces with God to do battle.

In my first half of life, I saw it through rule-laden eyes, and applied this and that to defeat it. God graciously allowed a measure of understanding, and even success, though I was far from understanding our greatest weapon of all.

Now, in the second half of my journey, I see that forgiveness is the centerpiece of all of our efforts in this life. When we get forgiveness right by giving it fully, without qualifiers, we get Jesus, even if we don't have His name yet. And when we get Jesus by giving full forgiveness, we trump evil.

Jesus, named Forgiveness, neutralizes every evil force that comes our way.

How easy it is to breathe new air, found in the places I denied myself access to before, just by holding a grudge or a hard feeling or a your-way-is-not-my-way stumbling block.

If we have found Jesus without granting forgiveness to those we hold hostage, we have only found a shadow that we call Jesus.

Funny that God would hide Jesus in forgiveness.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 8

My four-year-old granddaughter, Eden, told me matter-of-factly, "God tells you what to do when you grow up."

I paused for a moment and then offered, "I think when we are grown up, He helps us if we ask. Then we decide what to do."

Hers displays a wonderful, first-half-of-life position.

Mine, hopefully, is a step into the second-half-of-life, described in our journey through Falling Upward.

If ours was a robot universe, her view would be our entire lifespan. But what kind of companions to God would we be? If He didn't want us to bring something to the table, why would He have created us in all our complexity and talent and ability to synthesize and produce?

In Chapter 9, Rohr describes this second half of life as a new simplicity. Whereas our first half has a beautiful first simplicity, rule-bound, somewhat predictable with a measure of safety and security, our second half, arrived at through necessary suffering, becomes a huge field that has expanded--transcended--to include mystery and the unknown--and others' efforts to embrace this even when it looks very different than ours.

Rohr writes:

I have never figured out why unknowing becomes another kind of knowing, but it surely seems to be.

The "unknowing" in the second half of our spiritual journey is to see that God operates...the way God decides to operate, without our understanding, without our pat rules we trusted as a child, embracing others that don't look like us or approach faith like us. What are we to do with that?

In 1995, Azim Khamisa lost his only son, Tariq, age 20, in a brutal murder. His offense? Delivering pizzas to earn extra money in college. Tony, age 14, thought it sport to fatally punish Tariq for not handing over the pizza.

The startling end to the story is that Khamisa forgave Tony, embraced Tony's distraught grandfather, Ples Felix, and to this day presents with Felix a program designed to teach nonviolence to students.

It is striking to me that Khamisa's meditation, learned from a Sufi friend in Africa, does not have the predictable pattern and language of the faith often professed in Protestant circles. It appears that Khamisa does not technically call on the name of Jesus as he walks toward God. I am faced with this question:

Is it a shorter, more pleasing route to God to implement true Forgiveness--the synonym for Christ's redemption--even before one knows the name of Jesus, or to hold at arm's length those who haven't said his name because they haven't done it our way?

Like Eden, we get stuck in our four-year-old faith and reject those who don't act like they are listening to the God that tells us what to do. Until we wade through the necessary suffering of having our first-half-of-life parameters wrestled from our tight-fisted grasp, we can't see how God can teach us through such a not-like-ours worldview.

I want to err on the side of embrace. I want to know by not knowing. I want to understand by giving God room that I was uncomfortable with in the beginning, but now see with eyes of excitement, and ever-expanding love and curiosity.

God can lead each of us down trails we have never seen before, trails that we previously held in contempt.

Eden will find God's second Eden, the profound simplicity of letting God be His ever-larger Self. My job will be to watch her patiently and tenderly, as God leads her--and me--ever forward.