Author: inspiringchangellc

Good and Evil : God and Us

I have always thought that suffering makes theologians of us all. In times of crisis or despair, we turn to religious traditions or an intuitive sense of meaning to understand our experience.

The last few years of our social history — including the election of an unfit president, whose term culminated in an attempted insurrection at our nation’s capital, repeated police killings of Black men in the streets of our cities, an increasingly visible global climate emergency, and a two-plus year COVID-19 pandemic — has so disturbed our sense of human progress, justice, and order, that we have few words with which we can describe our current discomfort.

Look around you. There is no shortage of meaning making going on. Some feel a growing loss of personal power and blame Black and brown people for it all. They hoard guns and show up at street protests and state capitals armed with assault weapons. For others, anxious times call for self-protection and isolation, so they move their families ever farther away from people, stocking their bank accounts and pantry shelves so that they might turn away from the world’s chaos. Still others have chosen to frame the simple public health concept of wearing face masks in public as an assault on their personal freedom, joining vehicle convoys that clog the highways and city streets.

And then there are the rest of us. We are exhausted and worried, but still showing up for our jobs, checking in with parents in Florida, getting to the grocery store, and trying to help our kids through another unusual school year. We are just trying to figure it out.

Now the despot leader of Russia has launched an invasion of Ukraine. This country was once part of the former Soviet Union, but since that change 30 years ago has been proudly independent. Death, displacement, and destruction are the consequences of this war, begun by the maniacal greed of one man and his government. As the world responds to assist Ukraine, he threatens to use Russian nuclear weapons.

While we may be half a world away, media bring views of this suffering and chaos right into our homes. Many of us, already exhausted by the demands of the pandemic have felt an increased sense of helplessness in the face of such evil. The age-old question of evil looms large again. Where is God in this terribly broken human world? Can we expect God to be of any real help? If not, what’s the use of belief? Looking up from our televisions and laptops at one another, we wonder how all this makes any kind of sense. And then we try.

Here’s my try.

Invasions during peacetime are acts of evil. While such chaos can seem like a supernatural force, it’s not: evil is us, an embodied human event. It’s not some personified being or invisible spirit, at loose in the world, stalking the vulnerable, harassing the faithful. Evil is humans raging and running others over seeking power, seeking to hurt, get revenge, control, land, influence or prestige. Embodied evil kills lives, families, buildings, bridges, economies, history and fragile trust.

So then, where is God? We can look for God in the same embodied way. God is spirit until God embodies love in us. God is made visible, discernable, when human beings act with care, compassion, and justice. Halfway around the world, we can embody God for our Ukrainian neighbors: we can contribute money to relief efforts, we can pray, uniting our spiritual and mental energies toward peace. We can open our minds to the necessary political support of human refugees and migrants everywhere, waves of people just like us, fleeing their own land for basic safety.

As a Christian, this is my theodicy, my understanding of a divine, omniscient God in a chaotic and sometimes evil world: God can only be really known in our world when embodied: in words, relationships, and actions of human love, mercy, and justice.

This is how we see God, and how I understand who Jesus was: the unique embodiment of God’s being. In the daily struggle to be human, may love guide your decisions. That’s where you will find the divine.

(Published originally for the Savage Pacer March 14, 2022)

Serious Hope : it’s for Adults

Hope is a powerful mental perspective, best experienced by adults.

During one of the longer dark nights this winter while watching television, I came across an interview with a well-known criminal defense attorney. It caught my attention, as I recognized her name from one or two famous trials that made news over the years. I listened as familiar questions got familiar answers until one question sparked a pointed response I won’t soon forget.

“What gives you hope for the justice system,” the reporter asked the seasoned, serious attorney. Nothing, said the lawyer. Hope is for children.

I have thought often of that comment as we have been struggling with this continuing pandemic. So much of our common focus has been on the future: what to expect with this virus next, how to plan for changing work expectations, what to make of an interrupted school year, whether to schedule a surgery or vacation. We have things that must be done today to best manage tomorrow. Many of these plans have had to be scrapped as the virus spreads beyond our control, even with helpful vaccines, killing 5.6 million people worldwide since 2020.

Is it a childish thing to be optimistic about the future in a natural world like this?

Even before experiencing this pandemic, some found it helpful to expect regular trouble in life. Bad things happen and continue to happen, despite our best efforts of avoidance or preparation, they say. The best way to get through this life is to expect less so that when the rare positive outcome arrives, we are pleasantly surprised.

While this mental frame may seem like a reasonable concession to experience, it’s a short path to emotional stress and depression. Few really live this way; human minds are not patterned to expect suffering with every breath. When all that ahead is darkness, we experience it as a slow death.

Another way that human beings can move through the world is to assign meaning to suffering and resign themselves to its power. In the face of disaster, they seek peace through submitting themselves to the unknowable will of an unseen God. This submission can relieve the mind of the pressure to understand and respond to suffering. The emotional work is to bend the will to some greater plan. It’s a way to respond to suffering with passive acceptance, to embrace mystery and move on.

What is your natural frame of mind when it comes to considering suffering and expectations of the future? Are you naturally pessimistic, viewing the world as a place of struggle, pain and the occasional sunny day? Or are you more apt to put such ideas aside, trusting that some unreachable power determines our every move anyway?

Serious hope is for adults. I believe that a hopeful view of the future is a mature perspective, adopted by those who observe that within the randomness and chaos of the material world, there is also an observable return to center, to balance, to growth and healing that occurs in daily human life. While we may be swept away by sudden illness, or political turmoil, or personal violence, even these terrors aren’t a permanent state of being.

Everything changes, and as it changes, life has a global orientation that returns it to a new developing state.

As a Christian, I see this life orientation toward renewal a mark of God’s grace and presence in the living world. It’s because I have seen that both joy and suffering are not permanent experiences in this life, that the natural world, us included, is always working to restore and heal itself. I trust that within and underneath this life is an energy far larger than we, the life force that birthed the universe and is still creating it.

Perhaps this time of worldwide suffering has birthed a new life perspective for you. Along with fear, exhaustion and distrust, may you find an optimism that moves you toward hope and renewal. Without it, we are unprepared to embrace the life that awaits us, whatever it looks like, in communities worth living in.

(First published in the Savage Pacer newspaper, 2/5/22)

Is a Vaccine at Odds with the Christian Faith?

The Christian faith is all about loving God and neighbor. Get immune, save and love your neighbor and their children. Get the Covid vaccine.

Perhaps it’s never been possible to have agreement on the definition of a faith tradition; ideas about what it means to follow a religion have always been fluid and contentious. I read a news article this week that a settlement was reached in an employment religious discrimination lawsuit, granting a Minnesota man $65,000 in back pay and damages from his former employer over his refusal to be fingerprinted for a required background check. He said it was against his Christian faith to do so.

Henry Harrington claimed that his employer, Ascension Point Recovery Services (APRS), a debt collection company, had failed to make the required accommodation for his belief and fired him. A similar employment case was filed four years ago in Pennsylvania, when a local school bus driver refused fingerprinting as part of her background check, claiming that the process would leave the “mark of the devil” on her, preventing her future entrance to heaven. That’s news to me.

Many more of these religious objection cases have been filed across the country in recent years as social and legal changes have pressed up against long held personal beliefs about social responsibility, employment requirements, privacy rights and our own physical autonomy.

Can a life insurance company, considering you for a new policy, require you to release to them your full physical and mental health record, disclose your family medical history, take your blood pressure and a sample of your blood? Might they also review the public filing of your divorce decree from 10 years back? They have been doing such things legally for decades. Can a federal employer take your photo, driver’s license number, Passport information as well fingerprints to screen you for a job? Will it search for any records of arrest or legal charges brought against you in national data bases? Most certainly it will.

As more information about our individual lives is collected and shared, many of us are pushing back. Where does my right to security of person and property end and legal or social demands begin? And when we must make arguments for protecting those intuitive, personal boundaries, it’s no wonder that issues of faith, meaning and core values come front and center.

These same issues, it seems to me, are at the center of the debate around Covid vaccine mandates. For most of 2020, we prayed and hoped for the miracle of a safe and effective vaccine to be created by our nation’s research scientists, folks who have been steadily working on similar virus strains of influenza, bird flu, and SARS for decades. Because of the previous research, the vaccines came quickly, tentatively released after multiple trials with eager volunteers, giving us hope that it would snuff out the pandemic and its possible mutations with our majority immunity.

The vaccine is free for all. Now anyone over 12 can get immunized! And even after weeks and months of pleading and even cash incentives, 20% of eligible Americans have refused this life-saving medicine.

I have come to understand this refusal by so many as the result of all the loss of privacy many of us feel over the last two generations mentioned earlier. Some people, claiming conflicts with the vaccine and their faith practices, have received exemptions from vaccination in the past few months, risking their own health and the life and wellbeing of those around them.  Even when such exemptions don’t seem to be wise or practical, current law does allow such freedom when it comes to boundaries set by a person’s sincere religious practice.

But people are still dying, children are still not protected, and our medical personnel are traumatized by the continuing demands on their health and stamina. As new mandates are announced, reluctant employees are claiming a religious exemption, requesting letters of support from their Christian clergy. I want to go on the record with this admonition: Don’t ask your pastor for such a letter. Your pastor can’t make a coherent faith argument against receiving an approved vaccination that will save your life and the life of those around you.

Why? Because, quite simply, the Christian faith is centered on the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. And if there is a central theme to his life and teaching, it is love of God and love of neighbor. In this, Jesus taught, is all the Law and the Prophets. It’s not about creating a cover for your distrust of government, or resentment that you are expected to take medicine because someone else says so. It is not so you can live your life exactly on your own terms, shouting “freedom” until you are hoarse. Every day of his life, Jesus spoke and demonstrated his gospel, that as God loves us, so we are called to that same love of one another. To take proven medicine when you can, to save your own life as well as the life of the weak, young or vulnerable, is discipleship work. There is no religious excuse that makes any sense to me. Love Jesus? Love your neighbor. And get your shots.

 

(Written for The Savage Pacer, Spiritual Reflection column; Published Saturday, 9/18/21)

 

 

What the Church Must Now Do : Listen

The Church is so accustomed to preaching to the culture. It needs to listen.

For the first time in Minnesota history, a white police officer has been found guilty on three counts of murder of a Black man. The killing of George Floyd, captured on video, ignited a year of protests and riots, memorials, local distress and international outrage, all during a historic worldwide pandemic. It was horrible, and the impact, frightening and exhausting. The verdict, braced as we were for more violence, gave a sense of victory and relief.

Many are hopeful that this verdict is the signal that white Minnesotans are finally ready to confront innate racism, an implicit fear of people of color in general, and Black men in particular. But while we celebrate this milestone of difference and change, the deaths of Black citizens during interactions with police has not stopped, and the trials continue. Several weeks ago, 20- year-old Daunte Wright was killed during a traffic stop and arrest in Brooklyn Center.

How did Minnesota, a state proud of its progressive politics, the land of Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone, a culture that continues to claim the Christian value of welcoming immigrants and refugees, and is proud of its tolerance and high quality of life, create a culture where darker skin color seems to automatically signal inferiority or threat, even to police officers who carry weapons and are trained in use of force?

Implicit bias began long ago with European colonialism, its slave trade, and 250 years of slavery in the South. The struggle to end slavery sparked our Civil War. What followed — Emancipation, the South’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, federal Reconstruction, and Reconstruction’s reversal — soon made room for the policies of widespread legal racial discrimination.

Inequity based on skin color was routinely written into American family and marriage law, banking and mortgage lending, employment, voting rights, education, housing, public transportation and accommodation laws. All of which was routinely supported by teachings, sermons and policies of most Christian churches. These practices and attitudes effectively created a two-tiered American society, based solely on perceived skin color.

Minnesota was not immune. That century of legal segregation and migration out of the South shaped where children attended school, what families lived near whom, and where Americans worshipped, worked and played. It shaped where poverty was concentrated, where resources were located, how schools were funded. It has been such a part of our culture that our religious life has unwittingly reinforced these racial divisions.

What can we do as people of faith in response to this terrible legacy? We in the Christian church are quite accustomed to speaking to our larger communities with the words of our faith and traditions. Many of us are coming to realize we have been tone-deaf to the impact of our attitude and practices on people of color. It’s time we listen more than we speak.

Remember when most churches taught that homosexuality was an aberrant, shameful, sinful lifestyle? That majority religious opinion changed only when many of us began to really listen to the life experience of gay neighbors and friends. Opinions about sexual orientation have changed faster than during any other social movement in American history. While racism is decidedly different, it is our calling, as Jesus followers, to repent and renew ourselves for the sake of our neighbors’ lives and dignity.

These times call for the courage to relax our loyalties to the past and wonder how we might better embody the grace of God in a world of diverse history, race and experience. I believe we are being called by God’s spirit to humility as we consider how Christianity has been used to bolster the cause of slavery before the Civil War, and again, during the generations since. Even in our own state, in our churches, and in our families.

It’s not easy to shift our primary focus from indifference to curiosity, from speaker to listener, from confidence to humility. It means working against our own mental habits, our language, our assumptions about people and their experience in the world. But if we want to live lives of authentic discipleship, we must respond to the world around us as it is. We can work to listen and learn from neighbors we have excluded, judged and dismissed. Even when what they tell us confuses us. We may have tried to create churches that embody the gospel of Jesus, but our own history, revealed in eyes of those we have systemically excluded, shows us all otherwise.

  • Originally published as Spiritual Reflections column, The Savage Pacer, May 8, 2021

Getting back to community

As we move toward a more mobile and interactive lifestyle again, how do you imagine your need or preference for social gathering has changed?

At last, some good news: we seem to be slowly crawling our way out of the pandemic. Even with new variant strains, our community rates are low, hospitalizations have decreased and fewer Americans are critically sick and dying. More of us are vaccinated every day as supply increases. Schools, gyms, airlines, restaurants, museums and churches are starting to welcome people back.

But after a full year (and more) of limitations on our social gatherings, many wonder how our cultural institutions will look when we finally emerge through this crisis. We can’t just snap back after half a million people have died, countless numbers of businesses have closed, more millions have lost their jobs and our nation’s children, parents and teachers are exhausted by the loss of classroom learning.

As we move toward a more mobile and interactive lifestyle again, how do you imagine your need or preference for social gathering has changed? Will you embrace your earlier habits of frequent restaurant dining, attending crowded basketball games, or elbow to elbow live music concerts? Will masks become part of our normal attire at a doctor’s appointment or plane flight? And for people of faith, what will become of in-person worship when we can all get back together?

Church statistics have shown that even before the pandemic restrictions, Americans were changing their habits of worship attendance and affiliation to Christian communities. A sharp decline in participation has been measured in the last 20 years, and the loss of in-person participation in this last year has increased that loss.

The Barna Research group (barna.com) has discovered that while half (53%) of active church members report that they have streamed their church’s worship service in the last month, a full third (32%) of active members have never participated online in the last year. Even more disconnection is reported among members in the millennial generation (18-29 years old) as a full 50% have stopped any church participation since the start of the pandemic. While some churches report a number of new online participants this year, the number is too small to be statistically significant.

These numbers simply prove to me the obvious: that full human life, including religious activity, is meant to be lived with and among each other, not separate, isolated and apart. Video conferencing, while a wonderful technology and alternative mode of communication across distances, can never replace the experience of being together.

When we are in proximity to another human body, we share essential emotional information with one another about who we are and who we see the other to be. We communicate with more than our words: our bodies have a social language expressed in our posture, gestures, tone of voice, tilt of the head, the gaze of our eyes. We stand close, we hug, we step apart. We laugh, cry, roll our eyes, make a face, drop into silence, listen or shout together. The energy of these emotional expressions is felt in our nervous system, and we have the power to co-regulate one another as we connect with close relationships.

This is what I hope many more of us have learned in this last, very hard year together. That to be fully ourselves is to be seen and felt and known as we are when we are physically together. That to save our lives, we had to stay apart. But to be fully alive, to create human community together, we need to be physically present in one another’s space.

It has been a terrible year in so many ways. Staying connected to spiritual practice and people has been challenging, even as I have loved being together on Zoom on Sundays or talking books and culture on Tuesday nights. I will be forever grateful for our pastor and musicians’ optimism, consistency and focus as they pivoted from in-person to online in a flash. But when we can, churches will be gathering body to body, heart to heart, to sing, to pray, to listen for the word spoken. Because that is how our God has made us: spiritual people in physical bodies.

I pray you can find your way back to your faith community to regroup with others and be restored into the body Jesus called us to be. May it be so, and may it be soon.

(Originally written for / published in / the Savage Pacer, Feb 20, 2021

We Need an Emotional Revolution

How we deal with these difficult emotional experiences becomes critical to the way we move through our lives, adding to life’s satisfactions or burdening us with chronic distress.

Oh, 2020. The problems that we all face during this terrible, remarkable year continue.

It’s completely normal for us all to be dealing with very strong emotions; mounting isolation, anger, frustrations and fear can overrun even our favorite coping skills. How we deal with these difficult emotional experiences becomes critical to the way we move through our lives, adding to life’s satisfactions or burdening us with chronic distress.

It seems to me that learning to manage ourselves is the work of a lifetime and our earliest teachers are parents, siblings, grandparents and other close relationships who model how to deal with life’s challenges.

As we move toward the expanding social network of school and neighborhood, we inevitably take one of two emotional directions: we either gain the skills of self-management of distress tolerance and cognitive emotional understanding (sometimes chronically soothing our pain with less-helpful substances like alcohol) or, we seek relief by pushing our pain onto others. That displacement looks like blame, denial, verbal or physical intimidation, bullying, or violence.

No doubt you’ve noticed as I have a recent cultural shift toward externalizing fear and frustration that fuels the rhetoric of division, cynicism, judgment and hate. Whether it is the dangerous rise in hate groups, shootings and public violence against others or the distrust and bitterness of partisan politics in governing, none of us have been spared the real results of people who don’t deal well with frustration and pain.

This cultural and personal failure to manage our struggles has dangerous, real life consequences. Minimizing public health science has meant we have continuing, dangerous exposure to pandemic. Not acknowledging our national bias toward white, European history and our legacy of slavery means people of color are still judged as less worthy, less human and experience bias and bigotry every day. Not being willing to look at the mythology of capitalism and the American Dream means the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer — the poorest ending up homeless on our streets, in our neighborhood parks and our prisons.

Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Coddling of the American Mind) study moral reasoning and ethical leadership. They research and study the way we behave together. They have helped me better understand just what has been stoking our country’s increasing violent speech and actions in recent years. And it is no one person or political party’s fault.

One of the most shocking findings of their research is the way social media has impacted our shift toward emotional acting out and political extremism. Social media platforms are designed to keep us spending time on the site as a way to generate income (in the way of paid advertising) for the media companies.

How have sites like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and Pinterest been engineering our attention? By creating easy ways to form interest groups and ways for us to react to one another with comments, like buttons, emojis and post sharing, all rapid emotional reactions that tend to fuel more responses.

The recent Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, describes this strategy with candid interviews with the engineers who designed these sites. For the last 10 years, millions of us have spent untold hours reading, reacting and sharing information online, and now bad actors, including foreign governments, are exploiting these sites to stoke anger, despair and distrust during this bitter election and pandemic.

So, what can you do about it? Take a look at how you communicate. How do you manage your interactions in real life as well as online? If there is ever a time in our lives when we all need to hold ourselves accountable for our emotions, for the way we think, comment and react to other people and their ideas, it is now.

Assess how you show up in public spaces. You are in charge of your emotional responses, in person and virtually. Bring your best self to your Facebook page, your news article comments, the internet memes you share.

It’s time for an emotional revolution. One that values honestly, humility, toleration and facts. We can turn our national mood around, but it will take every one of us to grow up and manage hard emotions better.

Originally written for “Spiritual Reflections,” a weekly column appearing in the Savage Pacer newspaper.

A Divided House

Perhaps like you, I have been thinking continuously of how we have failed to overcome our national crisis of pandemic while other countries, such as New Zealand and Canada have had such different progressions of disease. There is a reason the pandemic continues in our country: we haven’t found a way to come together and fight this virus as one people.

Over the last 5 months our nation’s leadership seems split in two camps, one urging attention to strict social mitigation strategies, and the other minimizing the severity of the danger and ignoring the direction of our nation’s public health and infectious disease scientists. A portion of the population protests wearing cotton masks in public while others in their communities die. So, this is how we are going into a new school year: attempting to get back to in person learning, while trying to be safe, generally assuming that teachers, staff and families may all, at various times, come down with Covid19.

         I have run out of words to describe my feelings about the sorry state of our national attitude toward science, public health, the vulnerable, the poor, and necessary sacrifice for the common good. I am so sorry that you and I are kept from friends, from grandchildren, from vacations, graduations, weddings and normal on-campus college classes. But it’s not just our summer we have lost. Service and medical workers are exhausted and getting sick. Seniors are suffering from isolation and deep loneliness in nursing homes. Indigenous people on far flung reservations are falling ill without adequate fresh water sources or health services. Young adults are frozen in their job searches, businesses declare bankruptcy and millions have lost their jobs and benefits. And just this past week, current efforts to re-size the Postal Service come just as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail, threatening to impact the outcome of our November presidential election.

The days are long past that people of faith can say politics is not appropriate in church. White clergy have kept silent long enough. Many in our country seem intent on returning our nation to some kind of nostalgic vision of its past self, where we can pretend that black lives don’t matter, that individualism cloaked as “freedom” is the highest good, that we can build walls to keep out anyone who isn’t here already, and that white wealthy business owners know what is best for every American. If that is what Christianity looks like to you, you have only come in contact with a kind of white cultural American Christianity, one that worked hard to insulate itself from the actual life of Jesus Christ.

The God I believe created the world is the same God who, in Jesus, sought out the powerless, healed the sick, blessed the forgotten and challenged the way some accumulated wealth, privilege and power at the expense of the weak. He spoke of God’s kingdom as the power to free us from selfishness and fear and turn toward healing the world. This kingdom talk so threatened the men in power in Israel 2000 years ago that he was whipped and publicly crucified in order to silence him.

         I believe many Christians are so offended by Jesus they don’t want to hear how his priorities judge human politics. The values and policies we vote for and fund are exactly the way that we live our faith in our hometowns and states. Jesus called us to recognize the dark powers of sin that exist in us all, to turn from their illusions and be sent to live courageously in community with one another. What that means to me is that I’m called to be consistently for my neighbor and not against her.

         In a few weeks’ time, voters will again get a chance to choose a direction for our nation at the highest levels. No set of candidates is perfect because perfection isn’t humanly possible. But I urge you to reflect on how your faith intersects with politics, because if we claim to be Jesus followers, his kingdom critiques how we live together, how we solve problems, set laws and create vision for our nation. May we find a renewed commitment to become one people from many, as we seek to recover from such a difficult year.

ANOTHER death by police

On this past Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, George Floyd was thrown to the ground during an arrest on Chicago Ave, Minneapolis, two dozen miles from my home. He had gone into Cup Foods on the corner to buy some things, using what the store clerk believed was a counterfeit $20 bill. Did George even know it was a bogus bill? We can’t know because instead of conversation, the lead officer on that team of 4 police officers subdued him with his knee on his neck for nearly 9 minutes.

Passers by shouted, screamed, and begged the officers to get off his neck as George cried out “I can’t breathe” and called for his mother. A 17 year old on her way back home down the street had the presence of mind and the courage to video the entire scene. And then the strength to put that video onto the internet and it flew around the world.

George died under that restraint while the officer looked unmoved and even amused by the outcry the bystanders were creating around him. He knelt there while George died with his hand in his pants pocket, as if this was just a walk in the park. He has been charged with 2nd degree murder, and his fellow officers arrested and charged with aiding and abetting murder and other lesser crimes. The investigation and trial preparations continue by our state Attorney General.

George was a black man in a city and state that has always prided itself on being Nice and Progressive and Diverse. At least, for the white citizens of Minnesota. I am among those white citizens who, until now, may have known things were occasionally hard for our fellow citizens of color, but had little personal experience with the way police treat BIPOC people as if they are criminals and dangers to our way of life.

As our city and state exploded in peaceful protests and bitter and violent burning and looting, the world erupted in shock, shame, and revolt. Wave after wave of pent up despair caught the energies of many who filled the streets, airwaves and internet with stories, anger and hope for a finally awoken white populace to SEE the white skin supremacy that undergirds nearly everything and every institution in America.

People have been shaken and thrust into a new image of our state and country. White people are racing to catch up to the witness of black and brown persons who have lived this fear and racism all their lives. Not every white citizen, of course. But many, many more who have stood passively alongside before and who are now engaging, reading, marching, talking, writing, giving, and listening to try to understand and change.

I have been and remain committed to better understanding the white supremacy of our culture and how it has shaped me, my decisions and assumptions, and future vision of the world. May millions of us use the brutal lynching of George Floyd on a corner of Minneapolis one holiday evening during a pandemic and the presidency of Donald Trump to listen, to repent, and to work to change the world.

May George be the very last in the innumerable line of lynchings of black Americans. May his name be the last on the list of black men and women killed by our peace officers. May this nation pull itself toward equity and peace. And may all our leaders, including our highest office, once again reflect justice for all.

#lynching #GeorgeFloyd #blacklivesmatter #vote2020

UPDATE: COVID-19

Therapy is best done face to face as we communicate with one another with our bodies, emotions, faces as well our words and our silences. But in these unusual times of pandemic control, I will be adjusting my client contact according to CDC and State Health Department recommendations.

I am now offering telephone OR Telemedicine (HIPPA compliant video conferencing) to all new and current clients. Please call me directly at 612-735-2229 or email me at: lynne (at) inspiringchange (dot) us to get started.

In-office sessions have resumed. I ask that all in-office clients reschedule sessions to telephone or video conferencing if they have any active symptoms.

We continue to learn, experience and suffer together. May this worldwide experience bring hope in the midst of despair, and empathy over suspicion, healing in the face of disease, despair and death.