I spent several hours this morning cleaning my closet. I can control my closet. Then I took the non-joy items over to the Goodwill store. I smiled extra hard at the guys who unloaded my stuff. Yes, they were black. Then I went to Home Depot for a rain gauge. The gal who helped me figure out where the heck the rain gauges were? You guessed it. African American. I smiled extra hard at her too.
Back at home I went out to do some weeding between the driveway and the sidewalk by the street. I'm not kidding, there's 1,000,000 weeds. Everywhere I look, WEEDS. Grape vines creeping their little tentacles up my pine trees and creeping charlie snaking along the ground and burr things growing so tall it takes an ax to chop them down. Weeds.
I was out there several hours. People passed by. A lot of people. The really poor lady down the street who is my garden friend and doesn't have a roof on her house. Asian people. Black people. White people. Indian people. I'm not kidding, Eagan is more diverse than you think and we live on a busy bike path. I'm kneeling down pulling weeds and trying to smile extra hard at everyone, because I'm so scared of being racist.
While I was smiling so hard--you know what all those people said to me?
"Beautiful flowers."
They all thought I had beautiful flowers.
Come to think of it, I do have beautiful flowers.
There's also a million weeds, but not one person said--jeepers, y'all got some bad weeds here.
Nobody.
We don't call it a weed garden.
We call it a flower garden.
There's so much evil going on right now. But we're not all evil. I think that's what's bothering me. There's one million weeds, but everyone I know. . . is a flower.
I'm tired of having to be something. Republican or democrat. Black or white. Christian or non-Christian. Racist or non-racist. I'm tired of internally defending my conflicted and torn beliefs. I'm tired of feeling like I have to be on a side. It's exhausting.
I want to just be. Child of God.
I talked to Pastor Kris today and it sounds like our church is going to be doing some specific projects to build unity in our community.
We can't stop weeding out the evil, but we gotta mostly see the flowers or we're gonna get strangled by the vines.
Again I'm singing the old Lutheran liturgy from Psalm 51, it always helps.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me
Cast me not away from thy presence
and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.
Restore onto me, the joy of thy salvation,
and uphold me with thy free Spirit.
Peace to you. And me. I think that's about all we can take care of today. You and me.
That's what I love about non-dualistic thinking. We don't have to pick or be conflicted. We let God do the judging. My funk is deep as well regarding the shootings and shootings and shootings ... and ... there are so many flowers to be thankful for. We start in our hearts and homes and we do the little things that are ours to do because they are the big things. Love you!
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