UNDER PRESSURE! (7/23/2020)

“Pressure! Pushing down on me, pushing down on you, no man ask for.” David Bowie’s and Freddie Mercury’s legendary voices belt in my ear, the familiar tune and beat thumping in my head. I close my eyes and wish I had a giant bathtub. ALAS! I do not.

This world is STRESSED! This has been an exceptionally stressful week for me. So, lets talk stress relief! There are many options out there for things to lower our stress and cortisol. Good stress is ok, but bad stress over an extended time just isn’t healthy for our bodies or minds. We have to manage it! I asked my Facebook friends for stress relief ideas. It was a wild and glorious mix!

Funny TV shows got the first mention. “Schitt’s Creek” (yes, that’s how it’s pronounced) streams on Netflix and is a complete riot. It’s tough to be stressed after a laugh like that. 

Binge drinking got a few mentions (as well as other “mood enhancing substances”). I’m not telling you what to do. Just be safe. A glass of wine or beer is a common thing. I don’t very often, but sometimes an adult beverage is nice.

Video games are very stress relieving for some people. I’m assuming those people are good at the games. I’m not. I get very angsty and it would contribute to binge drinking. If it lowers your blood pressure - enjoy!

Deep breathing meditation and yoga are healthy ways to slow our heart rate down from panic to manageable. Yoga is a mixed bag for me. Sometimes relaxing, sometimes a reminder that I’m not exactly 22 anymore. Prayer is comforting. Praying to survive the yoga pose is necessary. 

Books are a constant presence in my life and always have been. I read to focus my mind before sleep often. A relaxing murder mystery or international espionage incident soothes my apparent dark soul. 

I love naps! I wish I could have back all the naps I didn’t want as a young child. I don’t sleep well at night and naps are very helpful. I have certain ones I love dearly. Sunday afternoon is prime snoozing. A long and hallowed family tradition to celebrate the day of rest with rest after church. 

Crafting involves a lot of frustrated praying & potential binge drinking for me, so that’s not my area, but it’s a good activity for many people. Sewing, crochet, creating new things is a meditation process. I do like coloring sometimes. Journaling and adding doodles is quiet and calming.

I think my best stress relief involves great conversations with people I love, big laughs, my pets, and wild dancing to loud music. My dance parties with our kids are something they’ve grown up enjoying. Sometimes, I wait until they are asleep, throw on my headphones and dance by myself. I’m not good with headphones because I usually start singing. I often forget others cannot hear the music driving me in my head. It’s a bit of a metaphor. 

I hope you’ll use this list, and other things, to find your peace, your pampering, or perhaps your groove. We have several more days ahead in this wild marathon of 2020. Be good to yourselves!

A Rock and A Hard Place

(Not my meme, but SO accurate!)

If there’s a theme for 2020, and there seems to be a few, feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place has to be a big one. Schools, economy, health care, virus prevention, everything seems stuck between that proverbial rock and hard place. 

As I write this, there’s still no word on plans with school, but you can do remote if you want to. I’m not sure about all kids, but mine don’t want to do remote learning. Teachers don’t either! Kids will be coming in with far more than the “summer slump” of forgetting things. Teachers want to be able to evaluate in person the individual needs for each child. That’s best done in small groups, which are advised against right now. In person should mean connection, but that’s not easy with just visible eyes. Speaking of masks, we are teaching our kids to be conscientious of others by wearing one correctly in our short outings, but we all know it’s not fun. Kids will struggle. Teachers will once again rise to the ever increasing demand on them to do *everything*. Our whole economy rests on kids going to school, really. That’s a startling realization and it’s an unfair truth. It really means public education should be our number one focus always, but that’s another soap box for another time. 

What do we do when people get sick (they will) and we repeatedly send the whole school home for 14 days? That surely doesn’t help the economy, but it’ll be mandatory. Covid cannot be allowed to fester and spread like lice. (Is anyone else itchy now?) 

Kids learning remotely aren’t doing well, either. We’ve tried that already. We made it work somehow between March and June, but that was survival. Now we have to figure out how to thrive and it’s a different hardship. Parents who work are in a bind. Students are struggling with the virtual learning environment, sometimes home alone. 

So do we send our kids to school to get sick or keep them home to struggle? Will they thrive in the new environments or be better off at home entirely? I don’t know. Most parents don’t know. Most teachers I’ve talked to are stressed and concerned. Most administrative people are at a loss as well. We know what we want, but that doesn’t exist right now. So once again, the children and educators are in the toughest spots. Once again, they will all find a way to collectively bloom where they are planted. I hope you all know that teachers need raises, right? Make it happen. 

What Does "God Bless America" Mean? (Perquimans Weekly 7/9/2020)

“So what does it mean for God to bless America? What does that look like?” A friend asked this question on Facebook on the 4th of July and I instantly knew I had to do some work on that! What a question! I sat with it a bit and then opened my Bible. I guess if we want to know about blessings, we look to the source, right? Then I opened my laptop, moved the kitten, moved the kitten again, and got to work.

God Bless America is a song we all have heard with familiar lyrics written by the incredible Irving Berlin during World War 1. It’s a patriotic love letter, and a true prayer, asking for peace & guidance for the nation. He revised it again in 1938 before our involvement began in earnest in World War II. Berlin loved this nation since coming here as a refugee when he was a child. You can see the love in the lyrics.

God Bless America

Land that I love!

Stand beside her and guide her

Through the night with the light from above

From the mountains to the prairies

To the oceans white with foam

God bless America, my home sweet home

From what I could find in an admittedly short amount of real research, the song is the first common usage of the phrase “God Bless America.” But what does it mean today? What does it look like to be blessed by God?

There is a wildly popular view of Christianity in the United States today. Dietrich Bonhoeffer described it as “Cheap Grace.” God has a wonderful plan for your life! Just follow these steps and you’re saved. It’s a name it-claim it prosperity Gospel that requires very little of us. There’s no repentance or suffering involved in this theology. “Take up our cross” certainly isn’t literal. Ask and you shall receive! It’s embodied on the famed #BLESSED bumper sticker on a fancy car. A rich, successful, self-serving life of #WINNING. 

I have bad news: This is not the kind of thing God means when he talks of blessings. In fact, nothing that is self-serving could be further from what God wants. Also, feel free to check behind me, but outside of Israel itself, God doesn’t make agreements with nations. There is no covenant with the United States. The New Covenant is with followers of Jesus Christ.

So what DOES God bless? I read the Beatitudes for that. Jesus was speaking to the crowd in Matthew 5. It’s by far the greatest sermon ever given, The Sermon on the Mount. I imagine as he sat down and looked around, he spoke to the people he saw.

He noticed a person’s eyes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

He may have looked at another person, his heart aching for their pain:

Blessed are those who mourn.

He smiled at another:

Blessed are the meek

Maybe he slightly nodded in understanding at another:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

He smiles gently and looks at the crowd, all of these people that he loves:

Blessed are the merciful

Blessed are the pure in heart

Blessed are the peacemakers 

Blessed are the persecuted.

I think God can absolutely bless Americans, but in my opinion, it will be individually as we are closer to Him. When we can look at a crowd of people and see those made in the image of Him, we will be blessed. God bless us, every one!

Two Questions/ Two Kinds (Perquimans Weekly 7/2/2020)

There are two kinds of police officers. I’ve met both kinds. I was privileged enough to grow up seeing law enforcement as friend, rather than foe. In fact, I may have gone my whole life thinking the bad was all on the news. 

Until last year, that is. I saw it with my own eyes. I feared for the lives of others from a person who had sworn to serve and protect. I’ll never forget that and it’s probably a good thing. Sometimes things happen and give you a choice to continue on with preconceived ideas, or change. I changed.

For this column, I crept over to the journalistic side a bit to interview five different officers in five different areas. Four currently active, one retired. One is fairly young, another with 30 years experience. I wanted as much variety as I could get in terms of location and experience. All are people I would consider to be a friend, so this is hardly a scientific method research project, but it is a small window into their own world. I consider these 5 men to be “good cops.”

I asked each person the same two questions and noted the answers, which were very interesting to me. I found differences in one answer and many similarities in another.

The first question: What made you want to become a police officer? This had 5 completely different answers. One dreamt of doing exactly this his whole childhood, another wanted to make a difference, another was spurred to action after the tragic killing of his mother; he wanted to honor her in a positive way. One decided after doing an entirely different kind of work that he wanted to just give this a go. One isn’t sure exactly when he decided, but it was what he was meant to do. They all wanted to get involved to make a difference, even if the reasoning behind the choices were different. 

The second question: What do you think makes a good police officer in 2020? 

The resounding main answer from all questioned was empathy. 

Empathy and police? That’s not at all what I expected, honestly. I wanted a clear definition for it, so I hit up Merriam Webster. The definition of empathy is the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner

also : the capacity for this

That’s a startling realization. I think it’s also the key that seems to be missing in many areas. I need us all to take a breath and look at this with empathy and even some rare nuance. 

Good cops do not want to see bad cops, and lumping them together is brutal. They don’t want to see the profession and their image trashed by bad actors behind the badge. As one interviewer said “we are real, normal people at the end of the day.” When the Velcro rips at the end of a hard shift, these are real people struggling with not only what people see on the news, and what they see on the news themselves, but what they’ve seen at work. 

Everything I’ve found in these conversations is that they believe Black lives matter. Police brutality is horrible. All they want is fair truth and justice and to help make a positive impact in their communities. They don’t want confrontation. It’s so much easier to talk for an hour with a person. That should make a lot of sense. One officer talked about the ways he can find out mental and financial issues, it’s like social work. Police want to help people in a positive way. Seeing someone find their way in life away from crime is a win for everyone.

I know there is much discussion about defunding police. The general idea is to use that money to better fund social worker and mental health care givers. That sounds good, and needed, but most police aren’t well funded anyway unless you’re in big cities. It’s much more like teachers, who are under paid and highly demanded. I think there is likely plenty of ways to find money to not only fund education, social, and mental care, but to support police in that as well. It’s a stressful job. One officer said “When it gets too much, it’s time to punch out.” 

I thought about that a lot. My retired friend doesn’t envy the hard road today of those currently serving. This is a difficult time. 

Policing has a pretty wild history, but like most things, it has evolved and continues to evolve. What we see now is not what once was. I think the years ahead will bring changes and adjustments that will attempt to benefit everyone. It won’t be perfect, because not much is, but we can start with empathy.