What Do You Look For In A Leader?

     Over the past few days I have listened to interviews with a former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, and a man seeking to become the next President of the United States, Donald Trump. I couldn’t help be notice the extreme contrast of these two men.

Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God…

      Jimmy Carter’s life started out in the rural south on a peanut farm run by his dad. He grew up in an African American community and his childhood friends were African Americans. He learned at a very young age about inequality and this developed his character for life. He was a one term President that boasts of being a President of peace. His claim to fame is not as a great politician. He is a man of deep compassion, faith and peace. This is clearly seen in his post presidency life. Jimmy has dedicated his life in the service of others in such humanitarian efforts as Habitat for Humanity, and in 1982 he established The Carter Center, that has had a global impact on eradicating human disease and suffering throughout the world. Jimmy has also helped to negotiate peace in countries around the world.  In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. He has lived an exemplary life from his deep convictions of faith. When I listen to him speak about his life I hear a man of humility and love for his God, his family, and the world. His life can be defined as a life of service to humanity and his desire to alleviate suffering where he can.   

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God…

   

  Donald Trump’s life started out in New York City. He grew up under the influence of his father, a successful real estate developer. Donald attended private schools and learned from a very young age to desire a life of power and wealth. As a young man he was groomed to become a successful businessman while working for his father. In 1973, his company was accused of violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to African Americans. Donald Trump has had a global impact through his development of Resorts, Casinos, Hotels, and his own Trump line of products. All of these investments are targeted for people of privilege. When I listen to Mr. Trump boast of his accomplishments, he likes to emphasize his power and influence. He talks about his ability to get things done. He wants to intimidate the world by having a stronger military force. His solution for world peace is through power and intimidation rather than negotiation. His style of leadership exemplifies the use power to get what you want. I don’t hear him talk about relieving suffering in this country or in any other part of the world. He is a businessman and he thinks like a businessman. His slogan is “Make America Great Again.”

So what makes America great?

We often hear of America being a great nation because of our freedom. Yes, we are free is many ways. We are free to spend our lives seeking wealth and fame. We are also free to choose a life of service to others. We have these choices. However, many Americans are living in poverty or near poverty so they do not have these choices. Their lives are focused on putting food on the table and a roof over their heads. We have many problems in this country and so it is vital that we have leaders who care for the people struggling in our nation. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. I am looking to support leaders who lead with their heads and their hearts. If we want to be a great nation and an example to the world then we need to take a good long look at how we are caring for our own. The world is watching.

 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Ending the Cold War In Relationships!

Every day, somewhere in the world, an incident occurs that we know as a hit and run. Usually the incident is an accident but there are also occasions when the hit was intentional. When a person causes harm or death by striking someone with their vehicle, it is lawful to stop and exchange information with one another. The right course of action is to restore peace to one another and to make restitution for the damages that have occurred. So why do people chose to run? I think that the primary reason is out of fear. When you find yourself at fault in a situation it can be extremely difficult to take responsibility for your actions, it's much easier to run.

I have found that this can also describe what happens in relationships at times. Have you ever experienced a hit and run type of relationship? Have you ever had someone that you love hurl accusations and abuses toward you, and then cut you off? Have you been told that your point of view is not relevant or welcomed? Or maybe you are the person who has done the hitting. What this creates is a personal Cold War between people.  

The term Cold War, describes tension without large scale fighting. The Cold War began just two short years after World War II. The Soviet Union and the United States were allies in defeating the Nazis. Unfortunately, the relationship between these two countries deteriorated quickly. The reason for this split was because of many things, but I think that one of the most powerful reasons was fear. Both countries wanted power and control. The Americans were afraid of communism and the Russians were afraid of the atomic bomb. Germany became divided politically between the communist east and the democratic west. This caused the erection of the Berlin wall in 1961. This was East Germany’s attempt at keeping people from fleeing the oppressive communist regime and finding freedom in the west. The Cold War lasted for more than forty years. What finally ended the Cold War was for Mikhail Gorbachev to initiate a series of summit meetings with Ronald Reagan. These two world leaders were able to work together to create a better world. Communism began to tumble in Europe, the Berlin wall was torn down and the reduction of nuclear weapons began. Without the willingness for both parties to come to the table and talk, there could be no possibility for peace. Mikhail Gorbachev opened the door for significant healing and change to begin in the world by his willingness to sit down and talk.

Life is difficult and relationships can get messy at times. I think that life is to short to allow years to go by with unresolved conflict between family and friends. So if you find yourself in a hit and run situation or an ongoing Cold War, what can you do? If you are the one that has been hit then you can move forward by way of forgiveness and a willingness to listen. Chances are that there is fault on both sides of the table.  If you are the one who has run away, then you can come back to the table and find restoration in the relationship. When we choose to turn toward one another, we find peace. When we run away from each other we erect walls that divide. These walls create much pain and suffering. The sad truth is that there can be no end to a Cold War without both parties wanting peace and restoration. It takes courage to end a Cold War. You have to be willing to honestly look at yourself.

What people remember most about the end of the Cold War are the famous words of Ronald Reagan, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” If you find yourself with the power to tear down a wall that is causing division in a relationship with someone whom you love, then I would encourage you, by all means to tear down the wall and end the Cold War!

I am reminded of the description of the action of love found in the Bible:

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered,  does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails!

We do not need to live our lives controlled by fear. 

Perfect love casts out fear. 

So if love is present, then there is hope!

Remembering Brad

   

      Eleven years ago today, I was giving a birthday party for my sister and brother-in-law at my house in Burbank, California. After the candles on the birthday cake had been blown out, the phone rang. It was our niece calling from Vancouver, Washington to tell us that, Bruce's brother, Brad had been in a terrible accident. Brad was actually killed in the line of duty as a law enforcement officer. That day broke many hearts. 

     So now every year on July 30th we are reminded of how much we miss Brad and of the hole that was created in our hearts through one man's act of rage and violence.

     This morning Bruce and I went out to the crash site to remember Brad and pray for healing. The violence that occurred on that site affected many people. This memorial was created by the family that lives at this site. They did not know Brad but felt compelled to

honor him in this way. Today as we were sitting on the log that is placed in front of the cross, the woman that lives there came out and talked to us. She told us that the neighborhood changed after Brad's murder. The people of this quiet neighborhood were deeply shaken. Murder and violence create lasting trauma. 

     Brad was 49 years old when he died. It is strange when someone dies an untimely death. He will never be older than 49 in our minds. We on the other hand, keep getting older which reminds us of how much life Brad has missed. I wish that he was still with us, growing old with us; sharing life with his family and friends. Instead, he lives in our memories and in our hearts. It is good to remember!

This photo was taken a month before Brad died, at his son's wedding. This is his granddaughter, Darby. She just celebrated her 13th birthday. I wish that he could have been here to celebrate this milestone with us. He really loved his grandkids!

"Real Struggle Marks Us For Life"

    Writing is a time consuming endeavor and I enjoy the process greatly. However, I like to write when I feel inspired and lately I have not found much inspiration worthy of sharing. So I have decided to ask other people in my life to share their stories as guest bloggers from time to time. My first guest blogger is Julie Bracken. She has a powerful story to tell and I believe that her life and story will be a strength and encouragement to many. Thank you Julie for sharing your life experience with us!

Julie Bracken
    
      I am the only child of northern European parents. My dad was an engineer at Boeing in Seattle; my mom was a stay-at-home mother.  My dad was raised Methodist, but didn’t attend. My mom was a strong, quiet Lutheran woman who took me to church every Sunday. Our life when I was young was comfortable, both financially and personally.

     In 1970, when I was fourteen years old, my mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm; the cause of her death I only found out years later. My father was destroyed by the loss.  He couldn’t talk to me about what had happened, or what would happen in the future. He arranged to have women from mom’s church come in the next day, even before the funeral, and remove all of my mom’s clothes and many of her personal belongings. It was as if he tried to make our life seem like my mother had never existed.

     The whole experience, from that first day and for many years to come, was a struggle for me. I didn’t cry for her; no one told me that I could. I put on a happy face and I worked hard to be a responsible, straight A student like I had always been.

     I quit going to church; mom wasn’t there to take me. But I never quit praying. Right after her death I would pray to God daily to never allow her memory, what she looked like, to slip from my mind. I had no photographs and dad left none in the house. I was frightened that I would lose the only vision I had of her.

     My struggle with her death was a process, not a single event.  In Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Joan Chittister says that struggle always happens just when it seems we have everything we ever wanted. She writes, “It is a sudden, unforeseen interruption of our perfect lives, the thing we thought would never happen to us…”. 

     Having not processed her death adequately, I wandered for years unable to feel emotions; either happy or sad, either delighted or broken. In this darkness of my spirit I wrestled with feelings; the anger that comes with a loss and the feeling of abandonment.

     But I couldn’t express this struggle outward. I never spoke of my mom, her death, or my longing for her. I never spoke of my struggle.  And, as might be expected, the weight of that struggle tore me down. Chittister says, “Struggle is never done without cost.  Real struggle marks us for life”. 

     It took decades, but recently I was able to confide in a psychologist what I had kept secret for so many years. And, while the loss has been processed and the emotions shared, it can never be undone. 

     I had guilt about my mom’s death. I knew I didn’t kill her. But as a child I believed that my struggle, my feeling of loss, must have been something that I brought on myself; I should have been able to make the pain go away. Forgiveness is not just for the other guy, as N.T. Wright wrote in Evil and the Justice of God, I first need to forgive myself. He says that if God has forgiven me, as part of living an authentically Christian life, I must forgive myself as well. I know that I am often hard on myself; that I expect myself to be a better person. My failure to express my emotions after mom’s death was a struggle.  It is through seeing God’s forgiveness of my sins that I need to learn to forgive myself. 

     In Jerry Sittser’s book, A Grace Disguised, he writes, “We cannot change the situation, but we can allow the situation to change us. We exacerbate our suffering needlessly when we allow one loss to lead to another. That causes gradual destruction of the soul”. The loss of my mother lead to the loss of or the inability to express my emotions appropriately.  Sittser says that this is the loss that happens inside us, the second death.

     Sittser goes on to say that we must enter the darkness of loss alone, but once there we will find others with whom we can share life together.  He says that “when people suffering loss do find community, it comes as a result of conscious choices they and other people make”. After many years of struggling I made the choice to seek out help, to share my loss, and thereby start the process of emotional healing.

     Chittister says that “Hope, the response of the spiritual person to struggle, takes us from the risk of inner stagnation, of emotional despair, to total transformation of life”.  And most importantly, she says that, “Hope is a series of small actions that transform darkness into light.  It is putting one foot in front of the other when we can find no reason to do so at all”. 

     I also believe that we have all known resurrection in our lives.  Each of us has been crucified in one way or another.  And we’ve all been raised up again. 

     Throughout my struggle I often asked “Why”. But, in the light of everything I have been given, I have no grounds for blaming God for my loss.  The call to faith is not the call to surrender to a God who tries creation for the sake of trial.  It is a call to believe, as Jacob who struggles through the night, that though we are in darkness, the dawn will come in its due time.  With the help of the Holy Spirit, we need to look into the struggle to find out what the blessing is.  I believe that if God is in the depth of the heart, no amount of darkness can extinguish that presence.

     It was a difficult transformation to relive my mother’s death and appreciate the hidden emotions associated with it.  I can now talk freely about her death, my loss, and my feeling of abandonment.  I also can express my emotions about other situations in my life. It was a long struggle. And even though the suffering is less now, I know that I will forever long for the closeness of my mother in my life. 

“When we suffer, we long for it to end. When we are in pain, time crawls. It also darkens and imprisons our imagination; consequently, we are unable to see beyond the suffering that plagues us…Unlike the world of matter, in the world of spirit a whole territory that has lain fallow can become a fertile area of new potential and creativity.  Time behaves differently in the domain of spirit.”  

                  John O’Donohue in To Bless the Space Between Us.

Remembering my Dad

   

   

Philip Andersen

   I have been thinking a lot about my dad lately. He was and is such a great influence in my life. I know that there are many people who have had the misfortune of losing their mom or dad at a young age but I was blessed to share life with my dad for fifty years. Seven years ago my dad took his last breath. His last words were, "I love you" spoken to my mom. I was not there when he left us and I will always wish that I had been present with him at this moment. 

     My dad taught me how to fully embrace life. Whatever he was doing, he would put his whole heart into it. Growing up in his shadow was challenging. He was a fierce competitor in every way. This brought him a lot of success in his lifetime. He did not believe in giving up and this was evident in the way he lived and in the way he died.

     My dad experienced much suffering in his life. When he was a small boy, his little sister, June died. Whenever he spoke of her I could see and hear the love and affection he had for her and the grief the he carried. He grew up in a small town in Iowa and had many siblings. He was the youngest living child and was his mama's baby, even when he grew to be six foot four inches tall. She would often introduce him as her baby. 

     One summer, when my dad was home from college, he met "the girl next door" to his parents. He fell in love and married that girl. After a few years they began having children. When my oldest sister, Susan, was born there were complications during the birth, and so she suffered brain damage. My parents would not discover this until much later. As she grew, she did not develop skills as quickly as other children. It soon became apparent that something was wrong. My parents spent  years going to doctors and hospitals to help Susan. It was a very difficult time with deep suffering. One day my mom answered the phone and it was the hospital calling to tell her that my sister had died. She had been in the hospital recovering from surgery. This call came out of the blue. My parents had just been with her the day before and they were not expecting her to die. The shock of her death sent my parents reeling into deep grief. I know that they always wished that they had been present with Susan when she took her last breath. My sister died at the age of seven. Her life and death set the stage for my childhood. 

     

Connie and Susan

Two years after Susan was born, my sister, Connie came into the world. Her birth was a fast and furious one. I have often heard the story from my mom of the nurses telling her to keep her legs together until the doctor arrived. The fifties were such an interesting time for women in childbirth. Obviously the medical profession did not understand natural childbirth. Connie became mom's little helper. She had to help with Susan who was a hand full and then I came along and so she had to help with me as well.  I was the third girl to be born and because of a difficult birth my mother would have no other children. So I became the closest thing to a boy that my dad would ever have. He taught me how to play many sports and I was encouraged to be a strong, assertive person and to not show weakness. 

     After Susan's death, my dad worked hard to take care of his grieving wife and two small daughters. Unfortunately, I don't think he knew what to do with his own grief. Within the next few years my dad's parents died and also my mom's dad died. As I was growing up, I watched my dad grow angry. I did not understand what he was so angry about. I was to young to connect the dots of his suffering that finally led him down that path of anger. I was very young when he was walking through those dark valleys and so when he started to release his anger I was puzzled. 

     My dad had his first heart attack when I was fourteen years old. I was away at camp and got a phone call that my dad was in the hospital. I wished that I had been home so that I could be present with him. I remember walking into his hospital room and thinking that he looked very old and grey. It was scary. He spent the rest of his life suffering with a broken heart. A few years later my dad's oldest brother, Peter, underwent open heart surgery. Sadly, he died on the operating table. I watched my dad fall to pieces when he heard the news. This was a whole side of my dad that I had never seen before. All of the pain and grief that he had bottled up inside burst like the breaking of a dam. I held him in my arms as he sobbed. 

     It wasn't long before my dad's heart disease had progressed and it was his turn to have surgery. He was so scared. He was afraid that he would die just like his brother. Seeing him before his surgery was a powerful moment. I saw my big strong dad in a very vulnerable state. He was very openly affectionate and told us how much he loved us. It was clear that he thought he may never see us again. Fortunately the operation was a success and my dad lived to see his grandchildren grow into adulthood. He was a fabulous grandad. He took great interest in each of his grandchildren and was a strong and powerful presence in their lives. We spent many years going on vacations together and I will cherish all of the sweet memories of those times.

     My dad was such a fighter. When he was seventy-five years old, he was out golfing one day when his heart suddenly stopped. He just happened to be golfing with a friend of his who was a doctor and so his friend administered CPR for fifteen minutes until the ambulance arrived. Laying there on the golf course, the paramedics had to shock his heart twice to get him back. We were later told that the paddles only work about one in every hundred tries. My dad was not ready to leave us. At the hospital the doctor told us that my dad would probably not live through the night and if he did live that he would probably not have any brain function. He did live through the night and then spent the next five weeks in the ICU fighting to stay alive. It was quite an emotional roller coaster ride for the rest of the family. One day he was up and the next day he was down. While he was fighting for life, my sister Connie graduated from seminary. Even though my dad could not be there to witness this moment, his spirit was with us. We were all so proud of Connie for her accomplishment but I know that it was bittersweet for her that day because my dad could not be there. He would have been the proudest of all. He did finally make a full recovery. The trauma had taken a toll on his body, but his mind was as sharp as ever. I watched my dad spend the next five years, until his death, reflecting on his life. He went through a spiritual transformation as he made peace with the life that he had lived. I had many thoughtful conversations with him during those final years of his life. I wish now, that I could have a few more. Those last five years gave him the chance to see two of his grandchildren graduate from college. He also got to dance at his grandson's wedding. I'm glad that he fought to stay with us. We all miss him so much.

    To be human is to love. To be human is to suffer. Love and suffering go hand in hand. The greater you love the more you will suffer. Losing those we love through death is the greatest suffering of all. And yet we would not trade the life that we shared with them for anything. It is this shared life that we carry with us forever. As I said earlier, my dad still influences my life through the memories I carry. He is a part of me and I see his influence in the lives of my children and grandchildren. 

     As I write these words, two of my cousins are fighting for life. My cousin Jeri has been clinging to life because of the great love that she has for her family and friends. She has endured great suffering over that past year as cancer has invaded her body. She has not let it take her without a fight. Again we are experiencing the reality of love and suffering together. For those of us that know Jeri, we share in her suffering because we love her.

     My cousin Julie is suffering with a broken heart. She has suffered from a heart attack and cardiac arrest. She has endured much suffering in her lifetime. I feel that pain that she and her family are experiencing right now. Julie is a kind-hearted soul. I remember her as a child and how much she loved her family. She was always happy to see you. As she lays in her hospital bed clinging to life we are once again seeing love and suffering mixed together.

     Because my dad came from such a large family, I have lots of cousins. My dad loved all of his nieces and nephews and so I was blessed to know my cousins and have a relationship with them while I was growing up. Even though as an adult I have not spent much time with my cousins, because of my dad, I carry them in my heart. My dad was always moved with deep compassion for those whom he saw suffering. He would always move toward them and be present in their suffering. He passed this desire to relieve suffering on to me and my sister. I am thankful for that legacy.

     
     Today is Veteran's Day and it is also my dad's birthday. He loved it that his birthday fell on a holiday. He was also a veteran. He loved to celebrate life and so today I celebrate him. 

Happy Birthday Dad, I love you.