None of us grew up thinking we would really ever face something like a global pandemic. A nuclear war maybe but not a pandemic. So, when an actual public health crisis came along, I did what comes naturally for me...I acted as normal as possible.

So, I got up each morning and took the dogs for a walk. Often, it was the only time I left the house at all.

I’m not sure I realized how cathartic those walks had become. I actually felt some joy because of how happy the dogs were to be on a "W-A-L-K." But, mostly, I felt despair. I would multi-task; I read news headlines and texted with friends I no longer saw at work. Then, I started dictating my thoughts into my iPhone.

That's actually how this all began, even though I didn't know at the time what I would do with the parts and pieces. The voice-to-text snippets were sparked by the current day but, more often than not, reached back into the past - my past.

It has taken me a long time to compile and edit these thoughts.

Honestly, I just needed a minute to recover from the very un-normal times we have just lived through - and I don't just mean COVID-19. I mean the politics, and quite frankly, the lunatics. And, let's face it, we are not through it yet.

There seems to be an age-old debate about what to do when you don't know what to do. I have often heard - and mostly agree with - the belief that the only way through something is indeed to go through it. But there is also the idea that sometimes it's best to just stand still.

Either way, it feels like it's time for these stories to go somewhere. Enjoy and stay well.

prologue

a cat.

4.8.20

I'd been wondering – amidst a pandemic, 60-hour work weeks, an adulthood of generalized anxiety and while running low on ADHD meds – where my breaking point would be. I imagined it would be from the strain of not seeing family or friends or simply from exhaustion.

I had also thought it was possible I wouldn’t break at all. But I did break. And it wasn’t from the weight of a deadline. It was an 8-pound cat.

A nearly 22-year-old, hearing-impaired fur ball with failing eyesight. A way-more-than-nine-lives feline. A cat who literally thought she should have a seat at the dinner table. A cat who ruled the house and several blocks of the neighborhood – though she didn’t go out patrolling it so much anymore.

A cat with a relentless meow to let you know she needed something – or maybe she just wanted you. A cat who loved to be brushed and who relished in it when you said she was a very pretty kitty. A cat that could never wait until the litter box was finished being cleaned to just go ahead and use it again. It was that cat.

She was named Sassy for many reasons.

Months earlier, I had made a pact with this cat. She would tell me when it was time for her to depart for the rainbow bridge. And she agreed.

I just never imagined it would be during a once-in-a-century pandemic. Or late on a Monday night, when we least expected it, and while the regular vet was closed.

But she was named Sassy for many reasons.

As much as I loved Sassy – which paled in comparison to how much my partner loved the cat she had rescued more than two decades earlier – it wasn’t just the cat that broke me.

It was the anxiety and depression.

It was an adult diagnosis of ADHD and wondering what I could have done earlier in my life and career if I’d only known my brain really was special.

It was the fact that nothing was normal, yet part of me was already anxious about what life was going to be like when the danger of the pandemic was over. If it was ever going to be over.

It was the political divide. It was Fox News. It was my love-hate with Facebook.

It was having to ask myself how I kept missing entire swatches of reality despite listening to NPR nearly constantly.

It was right before George Floyd.

It was John Prine dying of COVID-19. And it was Kenny Rogers’ time to go, too. And that hardly seemed fair; why would a guy like Kenny Rogers have to die at all?

It was that god had gotten our world so close to perfect when she created pets – except for that one flaw. The one where our animals don’t live forever and not even close to our entire lives. And that hardly seems fair.

May you rest in peace, Sassy. May you rest in power like the tiny diva you are.

"But I did break. And it wasn’t from the weight of a deadline. It was an 8-pound cat."

Dear Facebook Conspiracy Theorists

11.5.20

I don’t care who you voted for, that part is over anyway. I do care whether you care if everyone else’s vote gets to count. I care that you have some human decency left in you - and some basic understanding of democracy. I care that you believe cheating is wrong.

I hope you believe words matter and they should be doled out with care, not spewed out, riddled with lies. And so much meanness. Lord of mercy, hear my prayer to take the microphone away from those who hate so much that they want us to hate, too.

I care that, if you want something to be great, you realize that something can be great for you without putting someone else under your shoe. That’s not how greatness works.

I would like for you to get off the sidelines and stop Monday-morning quarterbacking other peoples' lives. I don’t care who you vote for, but the choice has always been very clear to me. It’s right there in Matthew 25: 36-40.

I believe you should accept me, but I don’t actually care anymore if you don’t.

And, I will love you anyway because Jesus told me to. Just like he told you to.

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

matthew 25: 35-36

resilience

11.2.21

One of many things I learned during the COVID-19 pandemic was that I don’t have nearly as much resilience stored up as I thought I did. Some, yes. But not enough to survive an indefinite and undefined challenge like this one.

I know enough about the human condition to know that resilience is not ready-made. It can’t be purchased in bulk and shared across families like a pallet of Kirkland brand toilet tissue. But I have also learned you can find resilience in a number of ways – from your relationships; through meditation and breathing; and tucked inside your reason to be. It’s been proven that whatever it is that keeps you going, does indeed keep you going.

I also believe there is some stick-to-itiveness inherently inside each of us. It was just put there, along with our hearts and lungs and brains and fingers and toes. Like the rest of our physical and emotional composition, the amount and availability vary greatly based on our biology and lived experiences.

“What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” is still up for debate, by the way.

It was early in the pandemic when I got the dreaded news – one of my parents was being rushed to the emergency department. But it wasn’t for COVID-19, it was a stroke. And it was my just-turned-80-year-old mom.

On the phone, Dad sounded like he always does in a crisis: calm; serious but reassuring. His voice cracked only occasionally. There was nothing any of us could do; Mom was in the ED and then admitted to the hospital all alone. She was by herself at a time when normally her children would have gathered round.

She was in the hospital with blurred vision and “Oh, just a little weakness and maybe a little dizziness still” while the world was trying to figure out, how exactly, coronavirus spread. She was at the local epicenter of global pandemic. Even her nurse was no doubt rethinking his career choice given he went directly from receiving his nursing degree into a hundred-year flu.

She sounded pretty good on the phone just one day later and hopeful, too. Her vision was improving and her strength returning. She came home two days later with a walker and a couple new bottles of pills.

Twice she walked from her easy chair to the kitchen without the walker and twice I chastised her. When the child becomes the parent, it’s clear from whom we learned to push our luck and stretch the truth. “Oh, I just forgot all about the walker,” suddenly sounded a lot like, “Oh, Mom, we just lost track of time,” when I was back in high school.

Most notably, Mom quickly returned to her old self – she was even funny and able to laugh. Thinking back on this, I now know that’s resilience. That’s resilience brought from somewhere deep inside to the surface and it’s not the first time in recent years we’ve all seen it. We saw it too when she had breast cancer at age 75.

I haven’t asked her, but I think my mom would say a fair amount of her resilience – her ability to bounce back from tough times – was built from, well, bouncing back from tough times.

Of course there has also been laughter – and lots of it. Lifelong friendships. Her family and her unwavering faith. But there has also been unimaginable loss and disappointment. Eighty-plus years of navigating life’s ups and downs. These all have fortified however much resilience was just placed inside her at birth.

Maybe that which doesn’t kill you does make you stronger.

"She was in the hospital with blurred vision and 'Oh, just a little weakness and maybe a little dizziness still.' While the world was still trying to figure out, how exactly, coronavirus spread, she was at the epicenter of a global pandemic."

dear believers

5.8.20

Dear Believers,

Turn with me, if you would, to the book of St. John’s Lutheran School, 1st hour of each Wednesday, grades 1-6. It was there that I leaned the most about Jesus and the Bible. The fire and brimstone, I could have done without, but many of the stories fascinated me.

We learned many parables during Wednesday chapel and took from them what our young minds could. There are still lessons to be learned today, in what I guess would be the really-New Testament. Turn to the Book of Face and you will find an abundance of problems for which divine intervention may truly be the only solution.

Believers, don’t you see it? Towers built by homogeneous groups of greedy people will fall.

Way back in Genesis, we learned about a group of mortals who had gotten too big for their britches and believed they could build a tower and become an equal to god. But god played a really great joke on them, didn't she? When they all came back from lunch break and discovered they couldn’t communicate anymore.

Or how about that time when the tax collectors thought they would sublease some space from the church? Oh, that one really pissed Jesus off.

Here is a pop quiz we never had to take: How can you believe in the wrongful, misguided persecution of our lord and savior and not see that we the people are still doing that, wrongfully, to our brothers and sisters?

Turn to the front page, of the news, this week and many others. Trevon Martin did not have to carry his own cross but he and his family have certainly had to.

Back there at St. John’s, I learned that it’s not always the story but the meaning we should live with. And I’m afraid if we don’t open our eyes, that it’s something our civilization will surely die with.

How can you believe he sent his only son to save only “me”? Because when you protest and weild guns and confederate flags, that’s kind of how it looks to me. But what would I know - a gay liberal? And also a child of god; believe me nobody knows better than me how hard that is to reconcile...

The Tower of Babel. Tax collectors in the church. Wrongful convictions. There are many stories and memes, many as far-fetched as the parables.

Misinformation we call it on the left; “Fake news,” they scream from the right. But there is one major difference: A lack of inspiration (divine or otherwise.) At the risk of sounding the age of my soul and not my actual years, social media is a big part of the problem.

Nowadays being published takes much less inspiration (divine or otherwise) and arguably less perspiration than it ever has.

We The People are the problem.

“Make America Great Again,” some say, clinging to their right to live under the thumb of the wealthy and privileged. Or worse, preparing to take up arms against unemployment, even if it’s temporary

Lest we forget, it was Jesus who said, The love of money is the root of all evil.

When I grew up, I realized parables are stories and stories don’t have to be true but they should leave you with something real. You could take away from Jesus healing the rich that we all need a savior. I for one look at the healings and realize we’re all worth saving.

Like the one where some critically ill COVID19 patients succumb and others have recovered and gone home. If this were biblical times, I imagine the healer would remove the vent and say, “Go forth and breathe, for you are healed.” And Im not sure why or who is chosen, but do fear that many of the causualties were suffering- mostly silently and without bullhorns or bullies carrying the confederate flag.

Hey, did you guys hear the parable where mortals were given the Power to choose who lives or dies? The one where the elders said, “sacrifice the old and infirm so the rest may go forth and prosper. But not me, for I have grandkids.”

Yeah, me either.

Instead, I remember that Jesus said, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5, for those of you following along.)

Um, excuse me Mr. Savior, I’d like to renegotiate that. It’s not that I’m not appreciative. It’s just that This is not the earth I want to leave to my nieces and nephews and grandchildren someday. Heck, I don’t even want this for my parents. Not when there are people out there who believe they would make an excellent sacrifice for the sake of the those who can still prosper.

Believers, remember the medical miracles Jesus performed? He dispensed his healing to the disabled, the mentally unwell, a kid with no dad, older folks. And the chronically ill, sometimes 10 at once.

He never once healed people for the sake of the economy. Not one miracle of healing, that I can think of, ended with Jesus saying. “Go forth and get back to work.”

The persecuted and false imprisoned were not his enemy, they weren’t the others, they were literally his friends.

Friends, the stock market shall not set you free. And by the way, it’s back to pre-covid levels now and I’m gong to guess guy don’t feel it’s upward trend anymore than you actually felt it’s downturn in the day to day. Yet I saw your memes and journalist-envy posts, the few that you wrote yourselves, facts unchecked and all.

Simon's mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked Jesus to help her. So he rebuked the fever, and it left her. Luke 4:38-39

“When did we see you sick?” ask the righteous in the parable of the sheep and the goats, to which Jesus responds, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:39–40).

The stock market shall not set you free and those for whom it matters are already free. And wealthy.

"She was in the hospital with blurred vision and 'Oh, just a little weakness and maybe a little dizziness still.' While the world was still trying to figure out, how exactly, coronavirus spread, she was at the epicenter of a global pandemic."