Month: October 2020

It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Alexander. He woke up one morning and everything went wrong! Gum in his hair, didn’t get a window seat on the way to school, fights with his friends, no desert in his lunch, had to get a cavity filled and his mom served lima beans for dinner. Remember that story? By the end of the book, you’d like to gently pat him on the back, telling him it might have been better to pull the covers over his head and stayed in bed all day. But it’s too late. I’d be inclined to slap the same title on this political season—actually maybe the whole year—on steroids. We’re down to single digits for the upcoming election and early voters are proudly donning their “I Voted” sticker for selfies on social media. Ughhh…. I’ll be glad when it’s over. But then we’ll have to endure the morning after and it doesn’t take an Enneagram Six to be able to threat forecast the rhetoric. Like a couple of kids playing Candy Land after somebody wins, the loser candidate will accuse, “You’re a cheater!” while the other retorts “I am not.” Until mom breaks up the kafuffle. And the sad thing is, both sides have their own posse of toddler-like tantrum throwers in the ready to pitch a full-blown fit. On the bright side, at least my mailbox won’t be cluttered with political propaganda anymore. My recycling bin won’t have to be emptied as often and I can quit blocking the callers blowing up my phone with automated messages incessantly mining for voting data.   

I’m not very political. I’m disillusioned with the way it brings out the worst in people. But I have friends who are immigrants. One more year and they’ll be card carrying naturalized citizens. I sat in their backyard six feet apart awhile back. “We’re so excited to vote!” they declared, a broad smile spreading across their faces. “We’ve never been able to do that before.” Wow! I can’t even wrap my brain around that reality. I guess it’s easy to take my rights for granted when I haven’t had to flee for my life under dictatorial rule. This privilege to participate in the process, it’s a mercy and my vote, it matters.  

4 years ago pre-election, I wrote a blog post entitled Donald Trump and my first Teenage Boyfriend. Honestly, I kind of forgot what I said in it until I pulled it up on my phone this week and reread it aloud to the cute kid in the picture, now my 16 year-old daughter, who found it hilariously entertaining. Here’s the thing, I need to make a retraction. In the post, I asserted that Trump was sweet-talking republicans, specifically evangelicals, wooing them with their litmus test issue to get their votes, intending a mean break up after he got what he wanted. That’s not what happened and I humbly recant on that point. You could legitimately make him poster boy for the pro-life agenda. You could paint a 30-story high mural with the headshot of President DT on one of his casino towers and say “Thank You, President Trump for being pro-life.”  I’ve seen murals like that on Trump Tower in Atlantic City. It’s just that rather than a headshot of Trump, a half-nude woman with a sad smile and creepy eyes, you know, the kind you see on I-94 billboards going into Chicago, the ones advertising a “gentleman’s” club or a cheap XXX rated shop, that’s what adorned Trump’s entrepreneurial empire instead.  

1 term into the presidency, Donald Trump has a rah-rah cheering section amongst many prominent evangelical Christians for championing the lives of the unborn. Problem is, that the unborn are not the only people who should be treated with human dignity. I can feel the gasps as I type. Before writing me off as a liberal who’s about to denounce my faith in Jesus and go over to the dark side, hear me out. I’m a pro-lifer. I was one of those sign toting, perimeter praying abortion clinic protesters in my 20’s. I’ve never voted for any presidential candidate who does not claim to value the life of the unborn. You can read more about that here: Politics and Bad Hair.  

God cares about ALL human dignity. Created by His design, his love extends to every demographic which includes but is not limited to people whose skin color is pigmented differently than our majority culture, seasoned citizens who are infirmed and vulnerable, human beings who are immigrants—either legal or illegal, children who were born rather than aborted into poverty, instability and danger, males and females who feel confused about their gender and disoriented about their sexuality, and girls turned women victimized by sexual perversion, harassment and assault.   

While Trump has championed the pro-life agenda, he’s decimated the dignity of many other image bearing creations before and after his election to the office of President. Just scroll back through his twitter feed over time or watch his TV appearances on Youtube. He’s regularly crass, careless and compassionless with his words and he takes verbal shots at anyone who crosses him faster than a semi-automatic weapon can unload a round of ammunition. His mouth is a like a cesspool and if that’s not repugnant enough, he’s a sexual predator too. Reports of fondling, grabbing, gawking, forcing his mouth and his penis in places that they aren’t invited are as copious as his real estate holdings. His first wife even accused him of rape. To bottom feeder Howard Stern, Trump boasts about his voyeuristic strategy of using his position of power as a pageant owner to intentionally walk in on and take advantage of naked contestants in their dressing room. And on Access Hollywood tape, he gloats about behaviors that are blatantly sexual harassment at the very least. Meanwhile, in a Business Insider article dated September 17, 2020, 26 women made accusations of sexual misconduct against Trump that substantiate his own admissions and he both denies the allegations and threatens to sue the victims for crimes he publicly boasted about committing. What kind of psychopathology is that? Narcissism maybe? 

With the nature of predatory people and the way they tend toward excessive narcissism, anything that challenges the perpetrator’s grandiose opinion of him or herself is an invitation to a fight. Some perpetrators launch public character assassination campaigns against their victims, while other are litigious, threatening legal and economic ruin to any who would come forward.

We Too: How the Church can respond Redemptively to the Sexual abuse Crisis, Mary De Muth

I’ve heard people defend Trump claiming his victimization of women is in the past. Let bygones be bygones, they assert. Maybe even slap some cheap and easy forgiveness into the mix for good measure. Others take a boys will be boys approach. Some choose to overlook his character flaws because they support his policies. To those individuals, I say, it’s a free country and we all get our own vote. 

My blog represents just me. And I can not stand before God, before my daughters or before my gender with a vote that disregards the human dignity of women. I will not make excuses for a perpetrators behavior. I will not disregard sexual trauma. I will not multiply disgrace on victims who’ve already endured the shame of exploitation. I will not communicate a double standard to the world that makes exceptions for perversions of God’s design for sexual integrity in order to achieve political expediency.

The lives of the unborn, they matter. And I won’t vote for someone who isn’t committed to protecting them. The dignity of girls and women matters too. God says it does. And I won’t vote for a sexual predator. That is my political manifesto.  

In this land of milk and honey where we enjoy Wisconsin dairy frozen custard, Colorado 14ers, all things Apple, Pure Michigan freshwater lakes and Chicago Pizza, surely, we can do better than this. Neither of these candidates represents the great nation that we actually are. With my 1 vote, I get a choice and it’s not just a choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I can choose whoever I consider a worthy candidate for the office of President of the United States of America. 1 vote. No more. No less. Fair enough.         

Labor Day was all different in the days when I packed my lunch, loading up my new Holly Hobbie thermos with warm Campbells’ chicken noodle soup, eager and anxious to see the list of teachers and students posted on the big picture window at school the next morning.
And in high school, somehow, I managed to spend the bulk of my holiday stressing over which outfit I should wear on the first day of class. All of my new school clothes were too warm for an Indian summer day but I had an image to present and if that required sweating, so be it.

My recollections are all fuzzy after that until the infamous Labor Day of 2002. On that afternoon, five of us and a 75-pound pooch parked out front of our new house in Dallas, Texas just before noon. The day was a scorcher–a few degrees cooler than my perception of hell. We unloaded our road weary bodies from our black Chevy Venture van, the dog especially eager for some exercise. The yard wasn’t much coming from a couple of country acres but enough to take care of her business. The house smelled like some sort of obnoxious aromatherapy blend of mildew and cat urine. I hadn’t remembered that from the showing…. Our moving truck wouldn’t arrive until the next day and already, the kids looked like somebody popped their imaginary pink Texas balloons.

“Hey, I have an idea!” Those could be the 4 words they write on my tombstone someday.
“How about if we make tonight a super fun camp out in our new house?”
“I’ll run out to the store to get a few supplies.”

Privately, the tears dripped like a leaky faucet through all eight traffic lights, and I parked in front of the nearest Target, feeling like I’d entered some sort of alter-reality. I meandered through the store like a lost puppy looking for a familiar scent. My cart half full, I checked out and headed home. We all laid down on the carpeted floor that night confirming the cat pee. The AC wouldn’t switch on and we might as well have been detoxing in a sauna. I tossed and turned uncomfortably wondering what we had done, sirens blaring in the distance. My final waking thought was straight out of The Wizard of Oz—“You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.”

Most of my memories of the next 13 Labor Days are connected with the return to our Dallas life. Memorial Day kicked off our summers in Michigan. Labor Day launched another school year in Dallas. Mostly, I’d scramble around our house organizing schedules and gathering up textbooks to start homeschooling, except for the year we spent Labor Day weekend dodging a hurricane along the Atlantic coast instead. But, the summer of 2015, our Toyota Sienna minivan got a new license plate that read Pure Michigan and that Labor Day, we adopted an inaugural tradition. Summer starts and ends at the beach.
It was Robyn’s idea.
“That, I can do,” I told her.
And we did.
And we have.

But this year, it was just me. Closing down the summer. On the beach.
Gratefully melancholy-musing over the memories.
Like the picture perfect Spring day our beautiful girl wore a white dress and made lifelong promises to her handsome man in the blue suit.
And the sunset walk up to Maranatha’s prayer tower with Angela when we were quarantining together for 2 weeks.
Dune climbing with Lily at Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore.
Kayaking with the fam at the Mackinaw bridge.
Hiking the shoreline ridge together then swimming in our clothes in Lake Superior.
Watching the windsurfers catch air from the Grand Haven pier with the hubs.
Birthday camping at the beach with my tribe.
Dune walking to the Big Sable lighthouse with one of my besties.

Today, a red flag with a crude white graphic of a swimmer, a diagonal line across the image, blew in the breeze from the park deck. Not an invitation to swim safely.
I watched little bitties digging holes to China with their shovels,
Mamas and kiddos bouncing around on the white caps in floaties,
Daddies and children constructing magnificent castles,
Doggies paddling out into the water to get sticks.
I saw grandmas and grandpas wave jumping with their grandkids,
Insecure teenagers trying to impress each other with their bodies instead of their character,
Mature friends perched up on the dune reading novels and drinking sweet tea.

Me? I arrived heavy-eyed and like some sort of magical spell, the waves lulled me to sleep. When I woke up, the sun sparkled all diamond-like on the water. I lingered long watching seagulls soaring and diving, dodging waves as they feasted on a decomposing fish floating in the water. I found myself reluctant to leave. To check the box. Another summer complete.

On my way home, I pulled into the Starbucks drive thru, the same one Robyn and I happily ordered our drinks from at a few years back. Hers was a peppermint mocha. Mine a double chocolaty chip frappucinno. Always. We drank to a summer full of everyday graces and anticipated fall mercies.
Honestly, I don’t feel very celebratory this year.
Maybe I need to re-frame my thinking. To repurpose a timeless truth.
The teacher in Ecclesiastes talks about an ebb and flow, like the waves crashing onto the shore then backpedaling their way into deep waters.
Starting and Ending.
Ending and Starting.
The seasons.
Life.
The Teacher in Ecclesiastes says it’s all part of God’s plan for this broken-beautiful world He made and loves.
So, I guess I need to embrace it too, cause if I don’t, I’ll miss the mercies.
That first Monday of September it’s not just the end of summer. It’s the beginning of Fall.
And To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)