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My Feeble Attempt at Building Bridges and Hoping to be Understood

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This is my feeble (if long-winded) attempt at bridge building and understanding. I started this piece weeks ago. I shelved it after the Charlie Kirk assassination. I picked it back up after President Nelson passed and then had a night where I could stop writing here and elsewhere following the shooting and arson of the chapel in Grand Blanc. I'd be lying if this was easy to commit to paper. But I have to. Rarely have I felt this level of compulsion to write. To share what I have to say.  Let me try. Here's a start. My faith is not what it once was. Surety has been replaced by hope. Which probably isn't a bad thing. The focus is more on fundamentals of belief and the actions they bring.  I have absolutely struggled with the theology, doctrines, practices, policies, and culture surrounding the faith of my youth. I'm open and honest about that. But I worry that's not always returned. The honest assessment that we all struggle with the teachings and guidance of such a l...
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Spoken Words are strange things

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Spoken word is strange. Without a way to catch it, record it, what happens? It disappears. Forever.  Airwaves and vibrations dissipating as quickly as they appear.  For centuries, millennia we only had one way to record thoughts. Words. Language. We had to write it down.  We say we can hear the voice of those long past. But we can't. As much as I love the written word it misses so much. Inflection and tone. Breath. Accent. Vowels and consonants.  If only we could have a way to lift that from the written pages of yore. To hear their voice.  The closest is probably music right. Staff paper, notes and lyrics. Maybe that's what's makes it so magical.  I don't know.  I just wonder. What the voices of the past really sounded like. And how we can be sure.  To catch the fleeting thing. The thoughts, the feelings, the moments.  --- There's a reason Shakespeare has had more staying power in the public conscious than Thomas Wyatt or Edmund Spenser. Chri...
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The way the church struggles with addressing mental health

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Too often us humans tell ourselves that religious participation will solve all of our problems. That all of the resources we need are in one place. But are they? Is church truly the place that fix all of our temporal and physical needs as well as the spiritual? Does it have the resources required to do so. I'm not sure.  This may be the ultimate expression of "I need prayer and my medication" I've ever written. Because I am seeing more and more how different aspects of my life need different helps and attention.  There was a time where I tied my mental health to my spirituality. But that has changed. Mostly through experience. Now I view them separately but impacted by each other. Both because I've needed to address my mental health. And because I channeled it into a career.  I love my current role in my career. I'm passionate about it. Being able to help people on recovery is a massive aid to my own recovery. I love being able to have access to literature and...
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Violence and America

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 I've been looking into violence, domestic terror, mass shootings, suicide, and murder rates and all that since about 2014. And started looking into it a little earnestly in 2020. A couple college papers helped focus that. Working in suicide management also kept that focus alive.  I'm not an expert. This isn't a primary research topic. I just have done a lot of research, and I think it's important we look at data at times like these. And also expand our scope of what we are looking at beyond the past week. Or even 12 weeks.  First we need to note that political violence is part of our historical and modern fabric.   https://www.thebulwark.com/p/a-history-of-violence-17a?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true Second political violence while common and consistent in our history is still rare.  https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states But it is rising. It is becoming more common over the last decade https://www.csis...
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Guns

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I own an AR-15. I built it from parts. More assembled it than built it. But that's how you put them together. Especially when you've spent a long time determining how you want to configure your rifle, what the use case(s) would be, and what makes sense to you as the user.  It's a facsimile of a dissipator. 16 inch barrel with full length rifle sights. But instead of a full rifle length gas system it has a mid length gas system hanging out under the handguard. Which instead of an A1 or A2 guard is a Magpul MOE. I run it with iron sights, just cause that's fun to do. Now to many people the writing of those paragraphs would paint me as holding very specific policy plans and goals. But there in lies the rub. The complexity and experience of being someone who owns firearms, really likes them, but thinks we can do more as a society to address the issues they cause.  I started writing this last year and kept stopping and starting. I couldn't ignore various events and the p...
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Surviving this year

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I can't say that I did any better than surviving yesterday. I muddled through my group. Struggled through charting.  I'm just tired. And it's a kind I haven't felt in a long long time. But it's pervasive, and it's getting a lot worse. I wonder how long I can keep doing what I'm doing. I used to think it mattered. Now I'm not so sure. At least to anyone but me.  For the first time I'm questioning what the hell I'm doing. And that scares the shit out of me.  I didn't think I would be one to find the purpose of life in my career. I am still not sure if that is true. But I do want my work to mean something. That those hours are worth more than the intrinsic value of the paycheck.  So what do I do? I'm not sure and maybe it's time to stop being circumspect and I should just face it head on. So I'm going to try that and just let things be what they are.  This current administration as an entity has enmity for the poor, indigent, homeles...
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